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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.  



You Can't Make This Up!

18/3/2019

 
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Dolphins have long captured our imagination because of their intelligence and their remoteness.  They are mammals that live mostly underwater.  Laurence Pringle, who knows how to make all forms of nature accessible and fascinating, has turned his attention to Dolphins as his latest offering in his popular Strange and Wonderful  series. This book is beautifully and accurately illustrated by Meryl Henderson.

There are many children who go through a dolphin phase much as they glom on to dinosaurs.  I had a granddaughter like this.  She carried a stuffed dolphin from the Chicago Aquarium everywhere she went for several years, while I fed her dolphin books.  There is a lot to marvel at when it comes to these denizens of the sea, whose lives and habitats are now threatened.

There are quite a few different kinds of dolphins--33 species--but we know the bottlenose the best.   One of the most distinctive features of this dolphin is its bulging forehead.  Called a "melon" [It]"contains fat that helps to focus sounds produced in air tubes and sacs just behind, enabling dolphins to make clicks, chirps, buzzes, whistles, and other sounds.  All  of these sounds are emitted directly from dolphin heads, not through their mouths." (Wow! I didn't know that!)

Here's another strange and wonderful attribute:  "As you read these words, you don't need to think about breathing.  It happens automatically.  A dolphin, on the other hand, decides when to breathe.  But how can it sleep and still keep breathing?  The answer: One side of its brain rests while the other stays awake.  Half-asleep, the dolphin rises to the surface to breathe." (Hmmmm...how does one think with half a brain?)

Like a bat, a dolphin uses echolocation to find food. And, like wolves, they work together as a team to catch prey.  They talk to each other in their own mysterious language.  They are playful as they leap above the water, often doing so to communicate to us.  (I saw this happen from a boat  off the coast of Alaska.  They put on quite a show!)

In Dolphins! Strange and Wonderful, Laurence Pringle feeds the appetite for knowledge while sustaining curiosity to know more.  If this is the fist book a child reads about dolphins, there's a good chance it will not be the last.  



Lessons from the Dead

17/9/2018

 
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Heather L. Montgomery has written an amazing YA book that touches the third rail of children’s literature—death.  The earliest types of children’s literature, fairy tales, were designed to help children deal with their own mortality. But Montgomery’s story of her increasingly passionate interest in the stories behind the corpses of dead wild animals is vividly captured in Something Rotten: A Fresh Look at Roadkill. (Pub date October 16, 2018). 

Like most of us, Montgomery first had to get past her squeamishness when she discovered a “squished” rattlesnake as she jogged along a country road.  The head had not encountered the automobile tire and it was magnificent.  Fascinating.  Intriguing enough for her to pick it up and open its mouth to see where the deadly fangs were hiding.  They were neatly folded against the roof on its mouth only to drop into place for piercing flesh as she pried the mouth open.  Curiosity overcame distaste.  The dead rattler made it home to be dissected and examined closely.  Heather L. Montgomery was hooked. 

Something Rotten is Montgomery’s journey of discovery of what can be learned of life through death.  It took her to a scientist who studied parasites in snakes, a curator of a natural history museum, a cayote expert at Princeton, a roadkill statistician, a Tasmanian devil researcher, even a taxidermist who made art from dead creatures.  All of her stories are laced with humor.  Here’s her take on feeding roadkill deer to alligators:

“Standing atop a wooden platform overlooking a swamp, squished in a crowd of people, we watched a man pull a blue ice chest past a shape that reminded me of cement lawn art.  The shape was sprawled out on neatly clipped grass: 4 clawed paws, a 6-foot tubular body, and a spiked tail with its tip dropping off the bank into a swampy river. A ripple in the murky water stole my attention.   A bump, 2 eyes, a snout—and suddenly a second alligator rose from the depths and marched, robot-like, toward the man.  Then a third. A fourth.

“Trapped! The man was caught between the gators and a 6-foot fence.  They formed a semicircle around him.  He didn’t run.  Didn’t try to leap the fence.  Instead he released the handle of the ice chest and stepped toward one of the gators,…… It was chow time at Alligator Alley.”


As I romped through the pages of Something Rotten: A Fresh Look at Roadkill, I couldn’t help thinking  of how much we’ve learned from curious people who have studied the dead.  The disciplines include anatomy, physiology, bacteriology,  pathology, and more.  Television shows portray medical examiners, coroners, pathologists—important professionals who investigate the causes of death. Countless people have gotten past the ickiness, and smell, and the fear of death to further their own knowledge and ours.  Heather L. Montgomery has written this book for the uninitiated young people who just might want to join their ranks. 


Knocking Themselves Out

4/5/2018

 
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Among the most distinctive noises of the forest is the sound of a woodpecker banging away at a tree trunk. Its tattoo rat-a-tat can be as fast as a pneumatic drill. Their headache-producing activity of pecking, rapid fire, into a tree makes them the easiest bird to recognize. No other creature acts that way. And if you need motivation to get off your couch and into nature, Sneed B. Collard III’s Woodpeckers: Drilling Holes & Bagging Bugs is an irresistible invitation to grab a camera and guide book and run into a forest, any forest, and listen for yourself. Woodpeckers are such strange birds they make you shake your head. Want to know more? Collard makes you wonder and laugh at the same time:

“Why? Why do woodpeckers peck into trees so much? Is it because they hate trees? Are they full of avian anger that they’re trying to work out? Are they bored because their parents took away their videos games? The answer—or answers—turn out to be simpler than that……..”
That is the kind of writing that make this book a page-turner.

It is also testimony to Collard’s love of shooting woodpeckers, with a camera, not a gun. So many of them have brilliant coloration, especially of their heads, perhaps to make sure we notice how they use them. A woodpecker’s beak is a chisel and its head has a special tendon harness to keep it from giving itself a concussion. They peck to find food under bark and to carve out a cavity in a tree for a nest. And sometimes they peck to make noise—they drum! They drum to let other males know where they are and they drum to attract females. Who knew? Scientists record the drumming and play it back to lure woodpeckers for study. Surprise, a woodpecker will attack the loudspeakers near the human observer. Their drumming is intellectual property!

Woodpeckers: Drilling Holes & Bagging Bugs is a beautifully designed book with heavy, glossy stock pages that show off the spectacular photos of these birds feeding their young, catching flies on the fly, and slurping sap loaded with ants. Collard and his son, Braden obviously spent a lot of time working to get difficult-to-capture action photos and they share some of their hard-won out-takes with us as well.
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The process of discovery, of being a naturalist, is shared with the reader. It is not quick or easy but it’s well-worth the investment. Publication is May 2018.

Making Amends for Human Environmental Damage

17/4/2018

 
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What do whooping cranes, wolves, bald eagles, giant Galápagos tortoises, California condors, American alligators, and American bisons have in common?  They have all been brought to the brink of extinction by human beings who hunted them, ate them, poisoned them with pesticides, lead, and micro trash, and destroyed their environments.  That’s the bad news.  They have also been rescued from extinction by legislation, caring naturalists, cooperative zoos and biologists.

Back From the Brink: Saving Animals from Extinction, by Nancy F. Castaldo, tells the moving stories behind all of these rescues.  Whooping cranes were hunted almost to extinction for their giant white feathers to decorate the hats of fashionable women.  And they weren’t the only birds killed for their plumes.  Bet you didn’t know that two women, Minna Hall and Harriet Hemenway, goaded the passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (1918) that lead to the beginning of their salvation. 

In story after story of these creatures brought back from the ultimate death of their species, I was impressed not only by the amazing details of Castaldo’s research but I was also envious of her adventures in collecting them.  She didn’t just read books and interview experts.  She traveled to the locations in California, the Florida Everglades, the Galápagos Islands, and her home State of New York to experience first-hand the animals and their preservationists.  This book was an adventure to write and that comes through to the reader.

I found myself angry at human greed, injustice and carelessness that afflicted each species.  I marveled at the Herculean efforts of individuals that went into each campaign to save them. Castaldo is tells moving success stories. At times I was in tears.  But she also hints at the many stories of tremendous losses she hasn't told.  How dare we destroy our fellow inhabitants of our planet!

We cannot lose touch with our planet and the need to preserve as much as possible of its diversity of life before it’s too late.  Nancy Castaldo’s  Back from the Brink: Saving Animals from Extinction  contributes to opening the eyes of the next generation.  

     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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