By now, most rufous-sided hummingbirds are wintering in the warmth of Mexico.
While most of us don’t migrate to Mexico, we can broaden our horizons with Bill Thompson III’s words and Connie Toops’ photographs, immersing ourselves in the thorough “Hummingbirds and Butterflies” (Peterson Field
Guides/Bird Watcher’s Digest Backyard Bird Guides, $14.95).
The sections about butterfly and hummingbird myths are particularly interesting: Hummingbirds migrate on the backs of larger birds. Hummingbirds feed only on red flowers. Hummingbirds sip nectar through a strawlike tongue. Caterpill
ars can’t sing. All butterflies need flowers to survive.
Thompson, editor of Bird Watcher’s Digest magazine, covers every possible area including planning a garden for hummingbirds or butterflies and predators and profiles.
It’s an excellent combination of writer and photographer educating us about butterflies and hummingbirds.
Here are a few other nature-related books:
“Dragonflies and Damselflies of Oregon” ($24.95) makes use of graphics to show the range and the months one can expect to see dragons and damsels.
Cary Kerst and Steve Gordon have put together the whole package and one that can be used by Washingtonians, too. Excellent color photos, science and identification keys are right on point.
And you have to love the names: black saddlebags, wandering glider, Emma’s dancer, lance-tipped darner, lyre-tipped spreadwing and sinuous snaketail are but a few.
“Demonfish: Travels Through the Hidden World of Sharks” ($26.95): Oh no! Another shark book! Fortunately, author Juliet Eilperin has rescued the topic by making a journey around the world and through the love-hate relationships of a thousand years.
But for all the shark discoveries up to the past decade, nothing has changed our knowledge base more than electronic tags attached to sharks. The tags have allowed researchers to track sharks’ journeys of thousands of miles.
Eilperin discovers the sorry story that is shark fin soup, dives with sharks, and brings alive the people who catch, sell and eat sharks.
“Jo MacDonald Saw a Pond” ($16.95): Taking off on Old MacDonald’s farm, Mary Quattlebaum and Laura Bryant provide colorful illustrations as well as plenty of swish-swishes, blurp-blurps, croak-croaks and scree-screes to entertain ages 3 to 8.
“Gobble Gobble” ($8.95 paperback) by author and illustrator Cathryn Falwell is another book for the same age group and out in time for Thanksgiving, not that these turkeys are offered up for dinner.
Ducks and decoys: Not a book but a preliminary waterfowl survey by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that’s geared toward hunters but offers a lot to learn for birders sans guns.
The waterfowl numbers are based on aerial surveys of breeding waterfowl, conducted annually since 1965 to estimate numbers on national wildlife refuges and set hunting-related regulations and limits. The survey resulted in an estimated 11 percent increase over 2010, with approximately 45 million birds.
Smelling their kin: Conventional wisdom is that birds have limited smell capabilities.
But researchers from the University of Chicago and the Chicago Zoological Society have shown that penguins may use smell to determine if they are related to a potential mate.
At least that’s the theory of odor-based kin discrimination to avoid inbreeding within a colony. Researchers identified that the oil secreted from the penguins preen glands was the source of the odor.
Columnist Sharon Wootton can be reached at 360-468-3964 or www.songandword.com.
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