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Survival at a Mountain Top

16/6/2020

 
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Have you ever heard of a pika? It was a new animal to me.  It lives in mountains at 10,000 feet and, as a skier, I have been to its habitat many times but didn't know where or how to look for it.  
Thanks to Pika Country: Climate Change at the Top of the World by Dorothy Hinshaw Patent & Marlo Garnsworthy, I am now enlightened.  The pika, also know as a rock rabbit,  is yet another version of a canary in a coal mine.  It requires cool summer temperatures to forage for food, (mostly grasses that dry to become hay) and stockpile enough to stay alive all winter.  

                     "Pikas are specially adapted to live in the chilly alpine environment among
                       the rocks and plants.
                      "In fact, pikas are usually only found in the mountains where the temperatures
                        are cool.  In temperatures warmer than 77 degrees Fahrenheit (25 degrees Celsius),                            pikas quickly overheat and die."

Pika Country, illustrated with photographs by skilled nature photographer Dan Hartman, is a picture book with intimate images of the pika barking, leaping, squeezing into a small rock crevasse, and carrying a mouthful of vegetation.  How did he ever get those shots?  Obviously, he had to be there, be ready and be patient.

The poor pika is prey to mountain mammals, like the weasel and fox and raptors, including the golden eagle and the prairie falcon.  Added to its woes, its habitat is shrinking due to climate change.  Where can you go when you're at the top of the hill and there's no more "up" to go?

The authors are exceptionally good at explaining the predicament by including many other alpine animals and trees that will be wiped out when mountain tops warm up.

They also include an excellent explanation of climate change and what kids (and caring adults) can do to slow down climate change.  Maybe it will also create the demise of the winter olympics? 

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."
​
 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.  

     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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