What books about nature have you read recently?

I recently read Great Waters: An Atlantic Passage by Deborah Cramer, a science writer who accompanied a scientific expedition from Woods Hole, Mass. to Barbados. This book has been described in Booklist as the first fullscale biography of an ocean, including its mythic history and its uncertain future.

Another troubling book is Ocean's End: Travels Through Endangered Seas by Colin Woodart. Especially heartbreaking is the author's description of the environmental degradation The Black Sea.

Not so many recently. I have a tendency to read so many books at once that I go back and forth on the nonfiction that has more discreet chapters. Most recently is probably the section of Monster of God on tigers in India, and Skywatch West on weather in the western US. Monster of God takes an interesting approach to a nature/wildlife book. I think perhaps what is so fascinating about it for me is that it is as much a sociological study as it is a study of the man-eating predators of the title.

I'm also really looking forward to get hold of a copy of A Land of Ghosts: The Braided Lives of People and the Forest in Far Western Amazonia. David G. Campbell was one of my professors in college, and had (back then) recently shifted his area of study to tropical rain forests, and particularly Amazonia, from the antarctic. He has a real gift for relating his research areas in more of a layman's book without dumbing it down. In his seminars he would often bring in food, clothes, blow-guns and other props from the region being discussed to give us a better feel for what the area was really like. The day he brought in Durians we had to have class outside.

grizzly.anderson: Years ago I read a magazine article about the deadly hazards of toiling in sugar cane fields in northern India in areas frequented by tigers. At some point plans were floated to issue protective plexiglass collars to these unfortunate people, but I'm not sure how that played out. Disastrously, I should think.

Other nature books I've read recently include Steinbeck's The Log From The Sea Of Cortez, Searching For Steinbeck's Sea Of Cortez by Andromeda Romano-Lax (the author attempts to retrace Steinbeck's earlier voyage), Vermilion Sea: A Naturalist's Journey In Baja California by John Janovy, Jr., and Rowing To Latitude (the author and her significant other challenge themselves in some of the world's remotest northern regions).

Or not so recently - I was looking back through my shelves and came across Changing Tracks, and figured it might be of interest to this group. I picked it up when I visited Denali National Park a few years ago and finished it while still in Alaska. The book covers a bit of the history of the park, but mostly the politics of park and wildlife management, and Adolph Murie's role in crafting the policies now in place.

It seems like the book is probably somebody's thesis scaled out a bit for a more general audience, but it still makes for a fascinating read and covers the evolution of predator management in the national parks quite well. Whenever I read something like this it always kind of amazes me how little often well-intentioned people understood about the complex systems they decided to "fix". For example the idea that the sheep needed to be protected from wolves, ignoring the fact that wolves and sheep had both been there for a very long time & were both abundant. Or the biased and willful ignorance that drove decisions to cull the wolves, such as the estimate of 1 sheep or caribou killed per wolf per day provided by a man who admitted to having never seen a wolf actually do either.

In any case, if you get an opportunity, I strongly encourage you to take a trip to Denali. It is probably the most truly "wild" wilderness in any of the US Parks. Rather than relocate animals from the areas of campground and interaction with people, they close the campground. Aside from very small systems around the two visitor centers, and one road through the park, there are no roads and no trails. And if you plan to go hiking in the park you are told "if you see a trail, walk somewhere else".

I'm about half way through my newly acquired copy of A Land of Ghosts. Gotta finish it before I take it to be autographed at my reunion this summer. As the sub-title says, this book is about the people and the forest. And since the forest is everything - trees, river, fish, birds, plants, insects, etc. it necessarily seems to get short shrift playing opposite to people.

What really comes across so far is the incredibly abundance of life, the seasonal cycles, and yet the great difficulty of making a life there. No particular animal or plant gets much stage time, probably because to even begin to do one of them justice would mean having to ignore all of the others, and lose the sense of great diversity and complexity.

For the people, it is pretty obvious that they don't really fit in to the forest, and Campbell touches on some of the economics and politics of the outside world, just enough to understand how so many mis-matched people have ended up in such a place.

When I see him, I'll have to ask if he just kept amazingly detailed notes of every moment of every day, or if the vivid here-and-now descriptions of so many places and animals are conglomerations of multiple trips and memories.

I just finished The Voyage of the Beagle. What a terrific adventure. Plenty of beauty, travelogue, natural history, quaint opinions on geology, humor and sadness (genocide of indigenous peoples). That stilted pre-Victorian prose is sometimes a bit tough to take.

I just finished Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and mentioned in other Group messages, that I just could not get into it. Spiritual, lyrical, award-winning, boring. Soem of the passages on insect life cycles and behaiors were pretty cool, though.

Hi -

I'm a Naturalist! I'm studying web design currently, however, so most of my recent reads have been geek books. Here's a website I did for a class last semester (all hand-coded):
http://my395.com/backyardbirding/
It sort of combines the nature and the geek part of me...

Prior to this latest obsession, last year I read Green Alaska - Dreams from the Far Coast by Nancy Lord, Two in the Far North, by Margaret Murie, The Forgotten Peninsula by Joseph Wood Krutch, Night of the Grizzlies, and I started Rising from the Plains by John McPhee, oh, gosh... we spent last year traveling from Baja to Alaska, so I'm pretty sure there are more... Before I started my classes, I had started Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan - does that count as a Natural History book?

I really liked Green Alaska especially - it parallels her personal stories of life in Alaska on a Salmon Tender with the Harriman expedition to Alaska which had John Muir and John Burroughs on it ("the Two Johnnies") among other natural history luminaries of the day! I want to read her other books - we saw Belugas while there, and she has a book on Belugas, Beluga Days, which looks good.

I forgot Two Old Women, which is a traditional Athabascan tale - short but poignant, about survival in the Arctic. And along the lines of survival (or not), I also read Into the Wild when we were camped along the Teklanika River in Denali, very close to where the story ends.

Lots of wonderful books to read and places to explore out there!!

Just finished Fixing Climate - What past climate changes reveal about the current threat - And how to counter it by Wallace S Broeker & Robert Kunzig.

An interesting history of climate changes, especially the end of the last ice age which, according to info obtained from ice core study. ect. occurred in several, quick, violent shifts & was not the drawn out process scientists had, until now, assumed. It is written for unscientific people to read & in the biographies of the scientists, there's a bit of humor. But it's the facts that make this a book worth thinking about.

Just read Southcrop Forest by Lorne Rothman. It's a bizarre little nature fantasy. I've read plenty of naturalist non-fiction over the years but its nice to see something with so much natural history that also tells a good tale. Author is an ecologist/zoologist (or so says his/her bio) and there's plenty of detail under the covers.

For nature fans, environmentalists and especially tree-lovers (with plenty of insects, mammals and fungi thrown in).

Toronto

I'm reading the highly recommendable The Ghost With Trembling Wings: Science, Wishful Thinking And The Search For Lost Species by Scott Weidensaul. The author, an accomplished amateur naturalist, travels the globe, searching for what are almost certainly extinct species, visiting remote areas where these tragically lost birds and animals once existed.

I'm forcing myself to finish Suburban Safari. Fantastic subject, but alas, I am not impressed with the writing.

Can I force the resurrection of this group?

I've recently read Wandering Home. Interesting, but not captivating.

I've almost finished reading The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction by David Quammen. I want this book.

Also reading Natural Acts: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature, an updated edition, also by Quammen. It's perfect for reading in bits.

Currently reading The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding The Origins Of Music In the World's Wild Places by Bernie Krause. The truly wild places are sadly diminished.

Finished The Magic of Reality. It was an ok science primer; perfect, perhaps for the YA.

And just finished that ol' classic Last of the Curlews. Sad, very sad.

Just finished that safari classic The lost World of the Kalahari.

It sent me flying over to google images, so that I could discern a Hartebeast from an Eland.

Finished the very readable and very shocking The Sixth Extinction.

I recommend the recently read Moby-Duck: The True Story Of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost At Sea And Of The Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, And Fools, Including The Author, Who Went In Search Of Them by Donovan Hohn

I was intrigued and of course saddened by Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures In The World's Most Polluted Places by Andrew Blackwell.

>19 tropics: I second the recommendation for Moby Duck. I read it a couple of years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Just started The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature by David George Haskell. Nature writing at its best.

David Haskell is a Brit who teaches at The University of the South in Sewanee, TN. This is a lovely area. For a year he visits a patch of forest and writes about his observations.

So far, I am enjoying it. I have to force myself to read slowly, so I can remember what he says.

Finally got around to reading and finished A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold. Another lovely book about nature.

And by the way, I loved Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. Read it years ago. Might be time to read it again.

"THERE ARE LOTS OF THINGS TO SEE, UNWRAPPED GIFTS AND FREE SURPRISES. THE WORLD IS FAIRLY STUDDED AND STREWN WITH PENNIES CAST BROADSIDE FROM A GENEROUS HAND. BUT—AND THIS IS THE POINT—WHO GETS EXCITED BY A MERE PENNY? IF YOU FOLLOW ONE ARROW, IF YOU CROUCH MOTIONLESS ON A BANK TO WATCH A TREMULOUS RIPPLE THRILL ON THE WATER AND ARE REWARDED BY THE SIGHT OF A MUSKRAT KIT PADDLING FROM ITS DEN, WILL YOU COUNT THAT SIGHT A CHIP OF COPPER ONLY, AND GO YOUR RUEFUL WAY? IT IS DIRE POVERTY INDEED WHEN A MAN IS SO MALNOURISHED AND FATIGUED THAT HE WON’T STOOP TO PICK UP A PENNY. BUT IF YOU CULTIVATE A HEALTHY POVERTY AND SIMPLICITY, SO THAT FINDING A PENNY WILL LITERALLY MAKE YOUR DAY, THEN, SINCE THE WORLD IS IN FACT PLANTED IN PENNIES, YOU HAVE WITH YOUR POVERTY BOUGHT A LIFETIME OF DAYS. IT IS THAT SIMPLE. WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU GET. " ANNIE DILLARD

Just finished The View from Great Gull a seventies conservation classic and a must-read for anyone in the congested Northeast who wants to get away from it all. 'Still owned by the American Museum of Natural history, Helen Hays still works there after about 50 years, 'still taking seasonal volunteers.

It lacks a real heavy naturalist theme, but I just finished Dirt Work. Chick Lit for the outdoors person.