Every Living Thing (Rob Dunn)

“Life will not be contained. Life breaks free. It expands to new territories, crashes through barriers… Life finds a way.” When Ian Malcolm (played by Jeff Goldblum in the movie Jurassic Park) said those words, he was foreshadowing the disastrous end of a human-designed biological theme park.  But he would have been just as accurate [...]

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Dog Treats in the Car

Give him your heart and he’ll give you his. That’s a truism any dog lover could identify with. I borrowed it from Marley & Me, an Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston movie that my daughter and I saw yesterday. The movie, of course, brought to mind all sorts of memories from a lifetime with dogs. [...]

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The Owl and the Woodpecker (Paul Bannick)

Bird books seem to my biggest new indulgence this year. No fewer than seven of them have followed me home (so far) in the last 12 months. [I've reviewed several here; search my blog for "birds" to retrieve them.] As a group, these books have been a delight. Birders and the little flitting critters they [...]

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Charles Harper’s Birds & Words (Charley Harper)

Charles Harper’s Birds & Words [LibraryThing / WorldCat] is a collection of about five dozen bird prints originally published by the Ford Motor Company in the 1950s and reprinted in a very limited edition twenty years later. Now, a year after Harper’s death, his paintings are gathered together again. Working in a self-described “minimal realism” [...]

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Nearly Human (Andrew Grant)

Much has been written about the point in evolutionary history when humans split from other primates, but Nearly Human: A Gorilla’s Guide to Good Living by Andrew Grant [LibraryThing / WorldCat] makes the comparison a bit more personal than DNA analysis and diagrams of an extended family tree. Grant compares gorilla behavior with ours and [...]

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Marley & Me (John Grogan)

Marley was not the world’s worst dog, although it may have seemed so to John Grogan from time to time. He was expelled from obedience school and ate speaker covers so thoroughly they vanished. (I won’t even begin to describe Grogan’s idea for a jewelry-cleaning business.) But Marley was, in fact, a wonderful dog. Their [...]

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To See Every Bird on Earth (Dan Koeppel)

Black-capped chickadees own the feeders in my back yard this time of year, but nuthatches, finches, and siskins stop by, too. Through the kitchen window over the course of the year, I’ve seen four kinds of woodpeckers, sapsuckers and flickers [below], as well as robins, hummingbirds, starlings, and others. The back yard is a diverse [...]

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Why Don’t Woodpeckers Get Headaches? (Mike O’Connor)

Taking my cue from the title, I imagined Why Don’t Woodpeckers Get Headaches? [LibraryThing / WorldCat] to be on of those 1001 questions answered sorts of books. You know the type: modestly informative but sleep-inducing. Mike O’Connor’s book was nothing of the sort. It is a collection of questions and answers, but O’Connor’s informal personality [...]

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Good Birders Don’t Wear White (Lisa White)

Editor Lisa White has compiled a decent collection of short essays by leading birders on a wide range of topics. These are articles that will overwhelm a casual birder with extreme detail. They are simple, often humorous takes on making the best of whatever birding experiences you choose to have, starting with the mix of [...]

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We Are the Cat (Terry Bain)

I haven’t had a cat since my divorce ten years ago. That cat died earlier this year at the age of twenty. Her name was Bugs. Her younger “sister” Rerun died a few years back. Before Bugs and Rerun, there was Arnie, Heather, and maybe a Kiki. Can’t remember. Lately, the only cats I encounter [...]

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