Adultery, backstabbing, infighting, parents favoring sons over daughters, food for sex, high divorce rates, bullying, homelessness, social climbing, older siblings murdering younger ones … what is the world coming to?
For the answer, read Bridget Stutchbury’s “The Private Lives of Birds: A Scientist Reveals the Intricacies of Avian Social Life” ($25). She makes a convincing argument that if we are to save threatened bird species, we need to know their social needs as well as their physical ones.
The bird detective delivers in many ways, packaging facts and insights, science and adventure with a folksy delivery that never undermines the seriousness of her research.
Kevin Callan’s “The Happy Camper: An Essential Guide to Life Outdoors” ($20) is a 21st century guide to camping in information and feel: slick pages, abundant color, graphs and maps, and outdoors issues of today and well as the basics.
The writing in “Flights of Imagination: Extraordinary Writing about Birds” ($23) is excellent, the main drawback being that some pieces were first published 20 years or so ago, leaving us to wonder what has happened since.
But put that aside and appreciate the talents of good writers. My favorite contributions were “The Colors of a Bird’s Egg,” “The Fall of a Sparrow” and “Big Bird Gone Bad,” the last an extraordinary piece by Charles Graeber.
He travels to Australia to find the southern cassowary, an avian hulk, 6-foot-plus and 180 pounds, with legs tipped with three claws: one 5-inch spike and two short sharp hooks (check out the Google images).
This is not your cuddly Big Bird of Sesame Street, unless Big Bird suddenly had a Hell’s Angel attitude transplant.
Picture this: tourists held hostage in a bus while a hungry cassowary keeps head-butting the door; cassowaries chasing hikers and joggers; an angry cassowary chasing a ranger on a motorcycle and slicing the mud guard; adolescent cassowaries invading a luxury resort’s pool area, snatching a purse and being chased around the pool (what was he thinking?) before sliding into the lunch buffet.
Western North America has a greater variety of bird species than the eastern section, so the fourth edition of “Peterson Field Guide to Birds” ($20) covers almost 600 species on 176 color plates with 588 range maps. Professional birders have updated everything and, in this digital age, also created 33 podcasts.
For children: Be an optimist and think clear nights, the time to look up with the extremely popular “Exploring the Night Sky” ($10), winner of the Children’s Science Book Award and in its 18th printing.
Terence Dickson takes older children away from Earth in light-year increments, breaking down a galaxy of information into readable chunks, complete with color photographs.
He looks at alien vistas before returning to Earth with help in seeing what is in our night sky.
The Blues band, Bing, Lulu, Uno, Eggbert and Sammi head across America searching for new sounds for their concert with Bing’s bird checklist as their guide in the children’s book “The Blues Go Birding Across America” ($9).
Along the way, the musicians surf and see a black-footed albatross; fish, where they hear ring-billed gulls; pick up jewelry at a bird-banding station; and admire the beat of a pileated woodpecker.
Each stop on their journey has three educational pieces: a birding tip, a notebook and a field guide, combined in an easy-to-follow whole by writers Carol Malnor and Sandy Fuller, and illustrator Louise Schroeder.
Columnist Sharon Wootton can be reached at 360-468-3964 or www.songandword.com.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
