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The Birds.....and the Bees

25/5/2020

 
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At a time when nature is attacking the human species, it makes sense to look at two other species that have been under attack for many years.  First, The  Turtle Dove' s Journey: A Story of Migration by Madeleine Dunphy, is a tale of the month-long  trip of one small individual turtle dove from his home near London  who travels 4,000 miles to winter over in sub-Saharan Africa.  According to the back matter, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSBP) began tracking  European turtle doves by satellite since 1980, when their population in Europe had dropped by 78% and are still at it, since 1994, with a further decrease to 93%.

The Turtle Dove's Journey is a picture book, illustrated with quietly stunning art by Marlo Garnsworthy. We see the travels of a single, lone bird as he embarks from Suffolk, England in the fall and flies due south arriving at Mali a month later with stops along the way. 

            "When migrating, the turtle dove flies at night because it is safer.  If he traveled
              during the day, predators like falcons and hawks could easily see him.  But at night time                    these predators are asleep."
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 Thus, the reader is invested in the fate of a single bird, as opposed to a traditional dispassionate description of the migration of many.  It is this point of view that gives the story its power.  A map of the flight path serves as an index of double-page illustrations depicting and acclaiming the turtle dove's rest stops.

The publisher, Web of Life Children's Books, is dedicated to stories of the fragile ecological dependencies of life on earth.  They also published Dorothy Patent's  At Home with the Beaver, ​which I also reviewed. 

There have been five extinctions of life over the past 3.5 million years.  We are now in the sixth.  Survival of the web of life is under constant attack.  A Turtle Dove's Journey  brings Madeleine Dunphy's focus on a lovely, seed eating bird, who routinely travels great distances for seasonal comforts in home territories 4,000 miles apart.  

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And now for the bees.  Honeybee:The Busy Life of Apis Mellifera  is a picture book written by Candace Fleming and illustrated by Eric Rohman, created especially for people that don't think of insects as warm, fuzzy, strong, loving and essential workers.  (Yes, I'm channeling Andrew Cuomo.)  The essential worker part, in the back matter of this biography of a worker bee Apis,  was revealed in 2006 when there was a collapse of honeybee colonies, both wild and domestic all over the world-- a pandemic for bees! It impacted "one out of every three mouthfuls of food in the American diet [that] is, in some way, a product of honeybee pollination--from fruits to nuts to vegetables."  

A honeybee colony is an intricate cooperative  society that is chronicled in the life of a single female worker bee whose job changes every couple of days.  Candace Fleming's lyrical prose leading up to a job that involves the act of flying (which we anthropomorphically think of as worthy of aspiration)  doesn't happen immediately. The intense, extremely active, slightly-longer-than-a month lifetime of Apis begins with a struggle to get through the wax cap of the cell in which she developed.  "Hmmmmm!" hums Fleming's words.  "Now what?" the reader wonders.  

Flying is delayed for days as Apis cleans up after her "birth," starts gaining strength by eating a lot of stored pollen, taking care of developing bees in the hive's nursery, tending the queen bee, building the comb for the reception of honey, processing incoming nectar from other bees until she is 18 days old and ready to start flying to collect nectar and spread pollen herself.   Her first flight is rightfully celebrated with a double page spread featuring Apis, a lone bee over a field of wild flowers.

Her nectar collection and pollen spreading career lasts about two weeks. During this time:
​           "She has flown back and forth between nest and blossoms, five hundred miles in all.

           "She has visited thirty thousand flowers.
             She has collected enough nectar to make one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey."
In the natural order of things, she dies but is replaced by a new worker bee struggling our of her wax cell. 

Both Fleming and Rohman are to be commended on this distillation of enormous amounts of meticulous research into lyrical prose and vivid, detailed art that pays homage to an insect whose colonies contribute mightily and essentially to the web of life.  



The Devils that Make Us Care

16/9/2019

 
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Cute little fella, isn't he?  In unfettered, expressive prose, Author Dorothy Hinshaw Patent explains how he got the name:

"The devil got its name in the early 1800s, when the first English settlers arrived.  Imagine being one of those settlers.  Darkness falls over your campsite and you are trying to sleep, when suddenly you hear mysterious, frightening sounds--unearthly screams and shrieks echoing through the forest.  The sounds alone frighten you, but then you see movement in the moonlight-- a black creature disappearing into the night.  You believe in the existence of the devil...." 

And so, the largest carnivore on the islands of Tasmania got a name it didn't deserve.  In recent years, it has developed a horrible disfiguring disease that it also didn't deserve called Devil Facial Tumor Disease or DFTD.  It was kind of a contagious cancer that almost destroyed some devil populations by as much as 95% in 2005,  almost twenty years after it was  first detected in 1996.  

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This was not a case of the "devil got his due."  This was an alarm bell to field scientists who understood that the Tasmanian devil was a keystone species.  Its loss would cause an overrun of all the animals it fed on thus destroying the balance of nature in its environment. Dorothy Patent was in the fortunate position to have a concerned scientist friend in Australia who offered her the chance to tell the story about saving the Tasmanian devil.  
As the latest addition to the terrific Scientist in the Field series, Saving the Tasmanian Devil: How Science Is Helping the World's Largest Marsupial Carnivore Survive,  Patent tells a riveting story of a race against time before a gruesome disease of a wild animal in a faraway land causes its extinction the face of this earth.  Coincidentally, we're also learning from this study information that may contribute to our knowledge of cancer in humans.

One of the great values of this book is how Patent learned to know what she needed to know to tell this story.  She and her husband went to Australia and Tasmania and met with the concerned scientists working on the problem.  It turns out that DFTD is a unique genetic disease with some quirky properties scientists had never seen before.  I loved her clear explanation of exactly how the genes  from the diseased devils were scrambled into a pattern where pieces of chromosomes became attached to other chromosomes in weird ways.  

Meanwhile the reader learns much about the devil and other marsupial mammals of this unique part of the world.  The photographs capture the wild beauty of a place barely colonized by humans. Saving the Tasmanian Devil is an epic story from a foreign landscape that catches the heart and inspires the mind. May it find its way into the hands of curious readers from middle school up.  






Busy Chewing Up the Scenery to Make a New Environment for Others

10/8/2019

 
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Meet an amazing animal that is doing its share to save the planet.  It's a rodent-- the "dent" part of its name refers to its teeth, which it uses  to gnaw down trees.  So how does that help save the planet?  The answer is in Dorothy Hinshaw Patent's latest book At Home with the Beaver: the Story of a Keystone Species.  She tells the story with gusto and her text works seamlessly with Michael Runtz's photos that add clarity, close-ups and time-stopping images worthy of intense scrutiny.

The beaver must chew wood-- something hard-- to keep its ever-growing front teeth short.  It uses its felled product to build.  It alters the landscape with its dams that stop creeks effectively enough to form ponds that become a new environment for many other species of plants, fish, frogs, insects, birds.  The pond becomes a food chain that would not exist but for the beaver. Since the beaver is the key to a new environment it is dubbed a "keystone" species.  The original keystone is the wedge-shaped stone in the top center of a stone arch that keeps all the other stones in place, making the arch possible, even without mortar.  
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This keystone is carved but it still makes the arch of this bridge stable and possible-Wikimedia commons
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The beaver's home is less asthetic but does the job. From At Home with the Beaver-Michael Runtz
The web of life, the inter-dependency of species- is a complex concept that is crucial to our comprehension if we are going to make an effort to take care of our planet and the current seemingly distant threat of global warming.  Patent's book shows the uninitiated how living creatures depend on each other and on the one species that creates a space for them to thrive.

​For those who love nature and have actually visited a beaver pond, this book is a way to introduce an amazing habitat to their friends.  For those who have never visited a beaver pond, At Home with the Beaver can motivate them to put down their phones, and make plans to go find one for themselves.  

Dignifying the Much-Maligned Hyena

16/5/2018

 
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Field biologists are a special breed of people fueled by a passion that makes a life of luxury and creature comforts pale with respect to the knowledge they gain from a life studying creatures in the wild.  Jane Goodall is perhaps the most famous trailblazer in this kind of science with her lifelong study of chimpanzees by living among them.  But she is certainly not alone as we meet Kay Holekamp in The Hyena Scientist, by award-winning nonfiction author, Sy Montgomery, illustrated with photographs by famed nature photographer, Nic Bishop. 

The Hyena Scientist is part of the Scientists in the Field Series, which are always a joy to read as the motivation and skill sets of field biologists become palpable to the reader through the talents of the authors and photographers who create these books.  In this case, Sy Montgomery and Nic Bishop traveled to a game park on the Masai Mara in Kenya, to gain enough first-hand knowledge from the source so that they could communicate to the reader. Montgomery and Bishop are not unlike journalistic embeds in military units who report authentic information about war. 
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According to Montgomery’s report in Chapter 1 of her book: “…This species is almost universally despised across human cultures.  Feared for biting children, hated for digging up corpses, dismissed as cowardly scavengers, the loving, social attractive animals playing and resting in front of us are widely considered to be dirty, ugly and mean.”  The “Not so!” that follows for the remainder of this 72-page, lavishly illustrated book for young adults (and adults) is an eye-opening narrative that introduces us to this species and the people who study them.

Here are some of the unusual traits of hyenas:  Their social groups are female dominated.  Indeed, the females are about 10% larger than the males.  Their heads are enormous compared to their bodies and their jaws and teeth can crush and grind the bones of larger animals.  Hyenas are not just scavengers, feeding on the leftovers of a lion’s kill, although they will eat just about any meat they can find.  They are also skilled hunters—the second largest carnivore in Africa after the lion.  As a result, they are a keystone specie that controls the life of an ecosystem.  What happens if we kill all the hyenas? This once  happened in South Africa, “The result? Ecological disaster:  explosions of herbivores reduced grasslands to deserts.  Soil erosion ruined roads and altered the courses of rivers. Only when the predators returned did the ecosystem begin to recover.”

As embeds, Montgomery and Bishop become a part of the five-person crew headed by Kay Holekamp, who live together in a camp, not far from the dens of the hyenas.  We get to know each of them and their varied backgrounds; most are graduate students, but one is a native Masai who started at the camp as an assistant cook and is now planning to study in the United States before returning to continue working in the field in his native Kenya. 

One trait they all have is patience.  Each day they plan on morning and afternoon sorties to observe the hyena colonies in action.  The hyenas are habituated to their vehicles (that took some time!) so they are not a disruption to their lives.  The thinking of the scientists is that you must be there every day to increase the odds of viewing something unusual and spectacular.  Montgomery and Bishop lucked out and witnessed one such rare event.  No spoiler here.

The subtitle of this series is “Where science meets adventure.”  The Hyena Scientist might get some couch potatoes with their fingers on video games thinking that there just might be a few other options on how to live a life. 
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My curiosity (and a book contract) got me to the Masai Mara many years ago.  Unforgettable and transformative.  Montgomery and Bishop brought me back.
 

     Vicki Cobb

    *Award-winning author of more than 90 nonfiction books for children, mostly in science.
    *Former Contributor to the Huffington Post
    *Founder/President of iNK Think Tank, Inc.
    *Passionate advocate for the joy of learning for every child and teacher.


    Disclaimer: All opinions, typos, and grammatical errors are my own,  especially small word omissions which I often don't notice in my fervor.  

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