The Undiscovered Country!

Our book today is The Undiscovered Country, yet another splendid production of the late great soul of Cape Cod, John Hay. As I've written before, these end-of-summer days always remind me of the Cape for some reason, even though I've known that blessed little hook of land in all weathers and all seasons. End-of-summer in New England is the practicum of beauty under siege: heat and humidity still rule the days, but the wind that whispers the trees at night is no longer quite so lazy or aimless, and the reliefs it brings feel increasingly watchful in their mercies. In late August the days are still hot and the sky is still a burnished blue, but if you pause near the edge of a pond or listen to the bird-chatter in a hedge-row, you can hear shorter, sharper notes being sounded: a less forgiving season is approaching. Maybe that's why this stretch of days at the end of August and the beginning of September always call the shores and clapboard houses and salt marshes to mind: because the many beauties of the Cape are all so intense that they feel fleeting. You want each hazy afternoon, each foggy morning, each protracted, glorious sunset to last forever, and you know they won't. There's a quietly penetrating melancholy that suffuses every Cape Cod moment for those with the disposition to feel it.

Hay had that disposition, in abundance. All his books are rife (sometimes - in fact often - over-ripe) with it. For his entire adult life, he was a passionate observer of the Cape in all its moods and especially all its wildlife. And he was able to access an ecstatic wonder over all of it, which he conveys in his frequent Thoreauvian arias, like this one on a favorite subject, fish:

They have mastered the universe of water that covers the major part of the planet. I have met only a few of their twenty thousand species, but each of these has illuminated the place I found them in. They pout, wiggle, and dart. They hang in glassy eyes of water, or in a downstream current. We see them, in their scaly reflections of water and sunlight, shining past our capacity to see. There are silver-sided minnows sailing straight over the brilliant sands; marsh killifish making quick dashes across the bottom of salt-marsh ditches, to disappear in puffs of mud; and in the seas beyond, the mackerel with rippled patterns on their beautiful fusiform bodies, slipping and flashing through the waters.

He's self-deprecating always in his prose (less so in real life, to put it mildly), and he's immensely respectful of the personalities of all the wildlife he encounters. "Being constantly aggravated little creatures," he tells us about that homicidal minuscule speck, the shrew, "they will, I suspect, attack almost anything. I was once faced by a shrew that, as I walked by, slipped out of leaf cover to hold its ground, twittering angrily, and I was the one to withdraw."

All Hay's books are beautifully written, but it's at summer's end that I notice how often he himself seems to feel the melancholy I'm describing. His prose becomes sadder and a bit more brittle when he contemplates the turn of the season, especially this turn of the season:

Beyond the sands, the granite-gray surfaces of the waves line out, whipped by the wind, while the leaden stream of the outgoing creek reflects the last golden light. Gulls lift and dip down into its waters. While the land begins to hunker down and accommodate to the arctic, the offshore waters protect their passions, keep sending in their signs. I found a fishlike cluster of creamy eggs as I walked down the beach, a little glistening ball I could not identify, left by the tide. Life floats in to prove my ignorance, if that ever needed any proof. But out reaching is never finished. These flat lands are like broad wings, stretching toward the cold sky, beyond the grain of the immediate, worlds without end. What should I do, if there were any choice, but fly?

The Undiscovered Country was written in 1981 when the author was in the middle of a fairly frightening health scare. The worst didn't happen, and Hay went on to write half a dozen more wonderful books. But none is quite so beautifully elegiac as this one, and it's this one I nowadays take down from the shelf when bully August finally begins to weaken and September with its change of season is finally sniffing the night air. In all likelihood I won't get to the Cape this season, but Hay's books make it easy to go there at any time.

 

Owl!

Our book today is one I've mentioned several times here at Stevereads: it's William Service's slim, gemlike 1969 book Owl, about the year he and his family spent sharing their house with a tiny orphaned screech owl. From the first day, a drama of mutual discovery unfolds, and Service records it all in brief, impressionistic jump-cut segments, many of which are as sharp and well-turned as poetry. "I enter it here," he tells us at one point, "that an owl on a stump has many acquaintances but few friends" - but it's quickly apparent that Owl (no other name seemed right) has found an entire house full of friends here - Service's narrative is unabashedly affectionate, and the book critics of its day responded in kind. Hal Borland called it "One of the most thoroughly delightful books I have read in years," the Boston Herald reviewer said it was slim and gemlike, and the great Richard Schickel said, "I cannot think of a book this year that has delighted me more than Owl." There were reprints, there was a brief vogue, hundreds of copies were given as holiday gifts, and a generation of hapless and doomed screech owl chicks found themselves in cages at pet stores. All of which was rather strange given the subject, as Service himself is the first to point out:

An owl is an odd creature to keep about the house. Also for forest, hedgerow, meadow to keep. An odd creature anywhere.

The heart of the book's appeal is the perfect match between Service's lean, quietly wonder-struck reports and that odd little creature he's scrutinizing. We've already seen the owl-memoir when it's written at meaty length by a trained naturalist. What we have in Owl is something very different: this is much closer to the list of initial observations Dr. Watson makes about his new flat-mate Sherlock Holmes in "A Study in Scarlet." Both chroniclers are mystified by their subjects, and like Watson, Service eventually comes to accept that he won't know everything:

Many people want to pet Owl, which sometimes he likes and sometimes he doesn't. His early way out of too much handling was to squawk and take off. Now, more likely than not, and depending on how well he knows the person, he will simply turn and walk a few feet away. Trust is too strong a word, but he has the expectation that he will not be chased and hugged to death. If it's my wife involved, Owl will most likely get his "huggle" no matter what. From inside the embrace he glares yellow outrage. Or perhaps he has found bliss. He is inscrutable.

Nevertheless, this short book is full of warm little memories that cluster in the mind long after the book is closed:

A Screech Owl Is Not a Lap Dog

... ours, nevertheless, does not conform to the image of the lonely hunter in his forest who has just two questions for anything that moves: Can I catch and eat it? Or can it catch me? Owl, as we have seen, likes to be tweaked and groomed, especially around the head and neck. Pull away before he has had enough, and a claw flicks out to retrieve the finger (You're a nice bird, Owl.)

Readers of living-with-animal books like this one will know how it all ends, of course. One day Service and his family are enjoying "that trivial, emphatic presence" same as always, and the next day it's gone. The whole thing is managed with such fine, gentle brush-strokes that it can take the reader a couple of readings to feel the pain underneath the words:

He has left a very small blank - precisely owl-shaped - in the daily routine ... a discontinuity which things still get caught on. And memoranda. A feather may yet swirl from a suddenly opened closet door, or come down with a book from a shelf. A fleck of lime in an angle somewhere. Punctured houseplants and page corners nipped off. We keep finding one more pellet.

Readers won't learn the evolution and natural history of owls or even screech owls in this book, nor will they learn much about Bill Service or his family. Owl is the story of pure intersection - brief, unpredictable, and surprisingly powerful. As far as I know, the book is out of print - but you should hunt down a copy and spend an hour reading it. Small as it is, you'll remember this book vividly for the rest of your life.

Gone for the Day!

Our book today is Gone for the Day, a collection of the columns Ned Smith did for the Pennsylvania Game News magazine from 1966 to 1969. As near as I can tell, the magazine included the book as a subscription gift one year and it became so popular they reprinted it several times - but still only for their subscribers. If this is true, those were lucky subscribers, and the original readers of these columns must have been luckier still, since there's nothing quite like the low-simmer enjoyable sense of possession that comes from finding a really good regular column and following it religiously (I guess the closest equivalent these days would be finding a really good blog and subscribing to it, but as with all things on the Internet, it just doesn't feel the same). The vagaries of magazine budget and space being what they are - and passion being, as always, unpredictable - you never know where you're likely to find such a column, and the ones that manage to stay very good for years at a stretch are rare. One thinks of Stephen Jay Gould's "This View of Life" column in Natural History, or Katherine Powers' A Reading Life that was lately and shamefully cut from the Boston Globe (and picked up, in a move so thick with ironies you can barely count them, by the Barnes & Noble Review). How I would have loved to be one of those readers catching Ned Smiths' "Gone for the Day" columns as they were originally appearing, always under their neat little banner (enviably double-talented, he did all his own illustrations):



Smith was a lifelong walker in woods and fields (and, thankfully for the rest of us, a "lifelong writer-downer"), tracking through wooded hills and mountains of Pennsylvania for most of his life, in all seasons and weathers, carrying a battered notebook and a camera and noting the comings and goings, the tracks and passages of the multitude of living creatures he encounters - or just misses encountering:

February 7: A rabbit that hangs out on the edge of a neighborhood woods left an easily read account of last night's activities inscribed in the snow. Near the fencerow he had bitten off a number of greenbriar vines and eaten large portions of each. The mark of where he had been sitting, and the vines bobbing as he nibbled, left an arc of gashes in the snow. The tendrils and formidable thorns had been neatly nipped off, and lay scattered about on the snow.

That quiet gift for detailed observation runs through this entire book - Gone for the Day easily accomplishes what all the best books of nature-writing do: it puts the reader right there in the woods (or swamps, or arctic wastes, or what have you) with our guide, seeing what he sees:

February 6 [the following year]: Red squirrels are natural-born clowns, and when they don't know they are being observed they are absolutely hilarious. This afternoon I watched the antics of three of them from a blind at the feeder. Where they came from, I don't know, but they exploded onto the scene like a troupe of vaudeville acrobats. It was impossible to be sure who was chasing whom as they streaked over fallen logs, up and down trees, and over the snow in blurry, intertwining circles. Occasionally they tangled, squealing and churring in real or simulated anger, then they broke apart, only to resume the dizzy chase.

(There's even a winning quality of innocence, as that last quote makes abundantly clear: as should be obvious to any less cheery observer, those squirrels weren't happily clowning around with each other right there on the doorstep of the breeding season - they were ruthlessly trying to bite each other's balls of and then rip each other's throats out)

Smith has that wonderful facility for disappearing, melting into the scenery so thoroughly that time and again he catches animals just being themselves, totally unaware that they're being watched. The animals almost always sense him eventually and then do their own disappearing acts, but before they do, we get many marvellous glimpses from the Pennsylvania woods and meadows and stream banks:

March 14 - A muskrat feeding on the roots of some unidentified weeds from the breast of our dam proved to be a surprisingly fastidious diner. Each time he dug up a root he carried it to the water three feet beneath him, where he carefully washed and ate it. Climbing back up the steep earthen breast he then dug up another and repeated the entire process. Not before he had laboriously washed and eaten half a dozen roots did he notice me sitting on the far bank observing his table manners. Without an upward glance he plunged off the bank and into the water like an overgrown frog.

And the book tries for more than such camera-glimpses - and it very often succeeds. Like most people who consciously make roaming around in nature a part of their days, Smith quickly came to appreciate and gently preach the restorative powers of spending time with animals in their world. Even after fifty years, Gone for the Day still breathes that restorative power - it's the next best thing to going out wandering yourself. It might prove a bit tough to find a copy, but I urge you to try: this is a nature book to keep and re-read for the rest of your life.

On the Wings of a Bird!

Our book today is H.R.Sass' modest 1929 hit On the Wings of a Bird, which was reprinted a handful of times back in the days before paperbacks, when almost all a book's sales were generated the old-fashioned way, through word of mouth. This book started out as one essay and grew through that demand, mainly because Sass is so poetically winning about what he calls the 'enchanted kingdoms' that all those who walk in the wild world manage to find. His are in the Carolinas, mostly, in the cypress-shaded lagoons and hot-wind beaches with their seal-shadowed sand bars, although such enchanted kingdoms can exist virtually anywhere, as we saw with dear old Nauset Marsh.  "You cannot trace upon any map the frontiers of your enchanted kingdom," he tells us. "It is remote and yet near at hand; you were far from it five seconds ago - oh, ten thousand miles away - yet now, in the twinkling of an eye, you are in its very heart." Aided by minimalist, winsome sketches by Herman Palmer, he guides us.

As Sass readily admits, this is mostly a book about birds. They certainly haunt these pages right from the start:

Sitting on the piazza on cool evenings in late September, I hear the voices of the feathered hosts that I cannot see. In hundreds and thousands and, it may be, in hundreds of thousands, they are streaming over my head, up in the black infinity between earth and stars. The whole air is full of them; now here, now there, now elsewhere, there various voices call to me out of the darkness. Some of the sounds I know well - the guttural "quok" of the black-crowned night heron, the high-pitched "skeow" of the green heron, the metallic chirp of the ricebird that travels in company with the larger wayfarers in the gloom. Others are sounds that I have never heard at any other time - that probably I shall never hear except on these autumnal nights when the far-called armes of the migrating birds are fleeing southward before the intangible, irresistible might of approaching winter.

But this is no monograph: plenty of other creatures wander in and out of these pages - deer in the woods, foxes, rabbits, and the two apex predators that were once ubiquitous all along the low-lying Carolina coastland, alligators and sharks. Alligators feature in our author's memories most fondly:

I like alligators. I like to see them and hear them; the bellowing of a big bull dragon, by the way, is one of the most impressive sounds in the American woods, an eloquent reminder of those colorful early days when a man could scarcely sleep near one of the great swamps because of the unearthly chorus of the wild beasts.

Because Sass was an avid surf-fisherman, sharks aren't quite as welcome in his recollections:

When there are sharks about, the surf-fisherman, if he has any sense, is constrained to stick to the shallows. In the easy chair at home he will laugh to scorn the tales that are told of sharks that attacked anglers, but in the surf slues, with a tall black fin showing above the foam-flecked water, he is apt to regard those tales more seriously.

And whether he's talking about menaces or marvels, Sass strikes one note entirely in common with all other good nature-writers - because he loves the places where he has wandered, because he wants them to be there for future generations, he cares most about stewardship. He cites it as the central theme of his book:

The utmost that can be hoped for is that it may help in some small measure to bring nearer the day when man shall cease to be a destroyer and shall become instead the friend and protector of his lesser kinsmen - the guardian and preserver of that marvellous life of earth and air over which, in the course of long ages, he has achieved almost absolute power. If it can give even the slightest aid to that good cause, its faults may be forgiven.

Whatever faults On the Wings of a Bird may have can certainly be forgiven - this is a gently spellbinding book, long out of print. It's doubtful Sass would have liked the many changes to his beloved Carolina coast since he put down his pen. Reading and smiling over this book, I just have to hope he'd somehow find enchantment there even so.

Ring of Bright Water!

Our book today is Gavin Maxwell's immortal 1960 nature classic, Ring of Bright Water, the story of his life in the West Highlands of Scotland in a picturesque little house he calls Camusfearna in the book - and more than just the story of that life: of course, as millions of readers have discovered to their delight over years, it's the story of the friendships Maxwell forms with first one remarkable otter, Mijdil, and then a second, Edal. So memorable is the impression the book leaves of these two remarkable animals that the returning reader is surprised to find that Mij doesn't even appear until 80 pages have passed - you remember it as his book from first to last, but Maxwell actually sets the stage for many pages before his acquires his friend in Iraq and brings him half-way around the world to the cold lakes and waterfalls of Scotland. We get many beautiful descriptions of the majestic bleakness of that part of the world - a bleakness that's ultimately impossible to capture in words, although Maxwell comes closer to doing it than any other author I've ever read. Even when he's in haste to tell an unconnected story, his descriptions are wonderful:

It was a cloudy night with a freshening wind and a big moon that swam muzzily through black rags of vapour. By eleven o'clock it was blowing strong to gale from the south, and on the windward side of the islands there was a heavy sea beginning to pile up.

But the real story here is Mij the otter, who takes immediately to domestic life and displays an abundantly energetic affection for Maxwell from the start. The reader is given scene after scene of Mij wandering the lakeside and hills, fishing and exploring, and coming back faithfully each night to the warmth of the fireside. The gentle nature of his curiosity about everything around him certainly clashes with my own face-to-muzzle experience with otters, but the passion of Maxwell's account is irresistible, and as in the best books of this kind, he gradually learns to un-learn his previous, inevitably parochial conceptions of what love is. When Mij disappears for a day, Maxwell is frantic with worry, and it moves him to self-examination (as he puts it, writers are duty-bound to a certain visceral honesty):

I knew by that time that Mij meant more to me than most human beings of my acquaintance, that I should miss his physical presence more than theirs, and I was not ashamed of it. In the penultimate analysis, perhaps, I knew that Mij trusted me more utterly than did any of my own kind, and so supplied a need that we are slow to admit.

And when Mij finally leaves the book forever (after only a year with his human friend), the sense of desolation that fills the pages before the arrival of Edal is suffocating:

I missed Mij desperately, so much that it was a year before I could bring myself to go to Camusfearna again. I mourned for my fallen sparrow; he had filled that landscape so completely, had made so much his own every yard of the ring of bright water I loved, that it seemed, after he had gone from it, hollow and insufficient; for the first time all the familiar things in which I had taken joy appeared as a stage backcloth against which no player moved.

But these quotes, though often foremost in my mind, are in a way misleading: Ring of Bright Water isn't a sad book - it has sadness in it, yes, but no reader will frown when they remember it. It's full of joy and communication and nature gloriously described, and the two pudgy, opinionated, stubby-legged creatures who star in its pages give no end of delight, which Maxwell has captured perfectly throughout. This author's career has long been a puzzle to me - it's absolutely strewn with some of the most poorly-chosen writing projects imaginable. This book is his only real masterpiece, despite the fact that he had talent enough for six or seven books this good. But at least we have this gem of an account - like Maxwell in this book, we must, I suppose, be grateful for whatever pure marvels come our way, for however long.

Fly Away Free!

Our book today is a slim little natural history title called Fly Away Free from 1981 by Joan Hewett, with some absolutely remarkable black-and-white photos by Richard Hewett. It's the story of a California veterinarian named Joel who loves to surf and who one day while out on the water finds a lone young pelican just idling there on the surface. Joel suspects something might be wrong, and his suspicions are confirmed when the bird makes no attempt to fly away from him.

Joel suspects the bird might be injured or disoriented somehow, so he brings it back to his animal hospital, names it Rusty (because his wings don't seem to work and so might be rusty), and sets in motion a quick but fascinating story of the animal world intersecting with the human world.

Rusty submits to the care Joel gives him - the feeding tube, the crate, the baths under a hose - with complete meekness. Reading the book, you can't avoid the impression - mistaken though it might well be - that Rusty knows he needs help and gratefully accepts it. Joel is certainly happy to offer it, although once Rusty starts to feel better and begins bossing around everybody at the animal hospital, the feeling is perhaps not shared equally by all. The hospital's cat, for instance, might not like being snapped at, and the hospital staff might not enjoy being squawked at (Hewett says the squawking wasn't very loud, pointing out that pelicans have very small voices).

In a few days Rusty is strong enough to go surfing with Joel, tethered to him by a leash. He clearly enjoys it as much as Joel does, and he grows very much stronger. He grows ready, as Joel knows despite not completely wanting to admit it. And eventually the day comes when they go to the beach without the tether and Joel releases Rusty into the free air. The vet stands on the beach watching while the bird flies away, and neither he nor anybody will ever know how Rusty himself thought of this weird, not entirely unenjoyable interlude in the human world.

The moral of the story? Sometimes the weird-looking bossy smelly ungainly creatures we find out in the world are only with us for a short time, regaining their strength, before they disappear back into the world again.

And sometimes they stay, perhaps because the world doesn't want them back.

The Lure of the Pond!

Our book today is Wallace Kirkland's lovely 1969 meditation The Lure of the Pond, which is sparsely but beautifully illustrated by Eugene Karlin and tells the story - in a string of twenty self-contained, poetic chapters - of Kirkland's various encounters with a pond in Wisconsin;

A narrow, winding road led up through a forest of naked trees disrobed by frost, and out upon a clearing. The land sloped gently downward to an abandoned cabin under a large poplar tree. Beyond it was a pond, winter-locked in ice. The brilliant midday sunlight of early March sparkled on a fresh fall of snow. In the distance was a wide expanse of marsh in which were whitened trunks of trees long dead. The left bank of the pond was once a cultivated field. Sumac and wild blackberry bushes now covered it. Along the right side was a tangled growth of willow and swamp maple trees.

An opening paragraph like that one instills a feeling of sweet peace in the reader - not only because the scene described is itself peaceful, but because we can hear the author's quiet authority, and it's reassuring. Kirkland was a photographer for Life magazine for 25 years, and The Lure of the Pond is suffused with visual imagery. But there's also a tempered wisdom here that comes from sitting quietly and watching the life of a pond forget you're there and resume going about its business. We've explored something of the mystery and joy of ponds before here, and Kirkland's book joins a small shelf-collection of other such titles that are the next best thing to being there.

Of course, given his job, Kirkland has been everywhere, not just to the tangled bank of his own little pond. This book is also alive with the richness of those many travels:

Another morning on the path in the abandoned field I came upon a painted turtle laying eggs. I was reminded of a night on Key Marquesas, beyond Key West, where I had seen a giant hawksbill turtle laying hers. The moon was full, the sea a sheet of yellow glass. She came in on the rising tide, her enormous head breaking the surface a few yards out from shore, and the pent-up air in her lungs was expelled in one tremendous gasp. I crouched and watched her lumber up across the white sand. The moonlight shining on her sea-encrusted shell enveloped her in a phosphorescent aura. She was like an apparition from from another world.

It's late winter here in New England, which means, in the 21st century, that high summer is only about three weeks away (the seasons of Spring and Autumn having been officially abolished during the 'strip-mine our national parks' years of George W. Bush) - the three ponds to which I make regular pilgrimages will all soon be open for business again, bustling with the uncanny microcosm of all life that ponds always present to the patient observer. Kirkland's book elegantly captures that microcosm, even if he does begrudge us his own photos. Karlin's minimalistic line-drawings are plenty compensation enough.

World of the Great White Heron!

Our book today is Marjory Bartlett Sanger's lovely, poetic 1967 classic World of the Great White Heron, which is very aptly subtitled "A Saga of the Florida Keys." The story she starts out telling, a relatively straightforward natural history of the most arresting resident of the Florida Keys, Ardea occidentalis, the great white heron, quickly broadens to a natural - and human - history of the Keys themselves, with the herons serving as a graceful, eternal counterpoint to all the tumultuous changes going on around them. The book is beautifully illustrated in black-and-white drawings by John Henry Dick, whose A Gathering of Shorebirds will get its own post here as soon as I can find my copy. Together, these two creators produce a book of a type that's rarer and rarer in these days of Wiki-harvested info and digital photography; I worry that passionate, entirely personal works of natural history like this one are slowly becoming extinct. Even David Carroll confessed a few too many times in his last book that he was feeling a bit old ...

Still, this book is here, and although it's not in print, copies can certainly be found - and oh! are they worth finding! The main joy of this book isn't necessarily its celebration of the great white heron itself (although anybody who's experienced the joyful shock of watching one leap into the air and languidly unfurl those enormous wings will be glad enough of that celebration) but of all the wildlife of the Keys - and forty years ago, just like now, there was a lot of wildlife to celebrate. These little islands stretch from Key Largo to Key West, and the biosphere of which they're a part, protected on the ocean-side by coral reefs and the tangled currents of the Sargasso Sea, wanders on south to the Marquesas and the Dry Tortugas. Tourists often comment on the crystal-clear water of the open stretches, but as Sanger accurately relates (and as can be found gorgeously described in many of the novels of Tom McGuane), the real gems of these islands are often hidden deep in the back-channels and mangrove thickets where Ardea makes its home.

The bird was named by John James Audobon when he visited the Keys in 1832 (he also referred to it as "the Angel of the Swamp"), and he also noticed the profusion of life in this part of the New World: alligators, crocodiles, egrets, deer, raccoons, turtles of all sizes, innumerable kinds of birds and noisy amphibians, sharks, busy crabs, and insistent insects. Sanger is as adept at capturing this world in words as her illustrator is at capturing it in pen-and-ink:

The world of the largest white heron on earth is the world of the crowding mangroves where the bird binds its platform nest and lays its blue-green "olivine" eggs. Now and then two or three pairs of herons will nest on the same island; less often a dozen may nest together. In its unchanneled wilderness Ardea movies in the kind of semi-isolation that has always typified this country of swamp and shoal, and made life there so unpredictable and perilous

This can be a very changeable place, a serene green paradise one day and a churning chaos the next, and its history reflects this - the Keys look idyllic, and like most places that look idyllic, their history is hip-deep in the tragic miseries humans bring with them everywhere they go:

The placid, tranquil-appearing world that Ardea surveyed this April morning had actually known a turbulent past. The dazzling light once bleached piles of human bones; the sea-green bay, banded in blue, maize, and purple, had also been banded with blood. Coral reefs at one time pierced the keel of galleons, and where the terns cry there had been human cries. Audubon's "lovely islets that border the southeast shores" were also called "The Martyrs."

The main difference in the Keys between Sanger's time and the present is the state of the coral reefs that are the protector and life-blood of the whole region. When Sanger wrote her book, they were a bursting, thriving underwater wilderness of infinite color and variety. Today, they're endangered like all reefs are, but warming currents and rising sea-levels. You can't help but wonder, reading this book, how much longer descriptions like this one will apply at all:

The reef that caused so much anguish was built by flowerlike corals. Anthozoa, or "flower animals," are living organisms resembling the sea anemones to which they are related, breathing, feeding, multiplying, and secreting a hard lime substance. It is of this substance that the reef is formed. Receiving nourishment from the current-borne plankton, the corals bud or branch out like calcium trees, and their surfaces are studded with starry patterns. In a vast variety of shapes and colors, they create forests of stone beneath the warm waters.

I spent some time nosing around the Keys many, many years ago, in a dented little sailboat with the company of five beagles (one of whom was my best friend, another of whom had been born blind, and the rest of whom could find trouble just about anywhere), and although what I should remember was the rampant heat and suffocating humidity, it's not - I recall instead the peril and profusion of wandering in a kind of paradise, the fun of wading in those clear waters with my antic dogs, even the beauty of racing for shelter from the rather respectable hurricane that struck a glancing blow while I was there. Even the light seemed different, and there are no words for how gorgeous the night-time was.

Sanger quotes the master:

William Beebe said: "Until we have found our way to some other planet the bottom of the sea will have to remain the loveliest and strangest place we can imagine." Lovely and anxious, striving and strange, it is all a part of the white heron's domain.

Lovely and strange - that does indeed sum up the Florida Keys for me - and it's not a bad description of this wonderful book, either.

The Order of Wolves!

Our book today is Richard Fiennes' wonderfully informative 1976 volume The Order of Wolves, a kind of follow-up to his equally-authoritative 1968 book The Natural History of Dogs, which I read with keen interest while surrounded by sleeping dogs. Even though I currently only have two dogs, it's still easy to feel surrounded when one of them is an, um, rubenesque basset hound, and so it was that I read The Order of Wolves also surrounded by sleeping dogs.

Fiennes covers every aspect of wolves in the world, from the emergence of their most distant ancestor the creodonts, somewhere around 60 million years ago (the creodonts also gave rise to a whole slew of other furry critters, from raccoons and bears to ... echh ... cats) to their establishment in roughly the form we know them today, around 30 million years ago, from their hunting methods to the methods used to hunt them, from their interactions with other members of their species (Fiennes stops short of calling this a culture, but then, most people do) to the vast literature of their interaction with mankind. He admits that few other animals have such a rich history of false impressions (when it comes to humans) than the wolf, and his book calmly and methodically sets out to correct that.

The task necessarily requires a certain amount of big-picture thinking, and Fiennes tries to make this as painless as possible:

At the border of any habitat favourable to a particular life form, there is always a 'tension zone' where different habitats merge. These form the outer limits, where the 'ecotypes' change, but there is inevitably some overlap where the species from the one habitat compete with those from the other... In such areas, species tend to change their ways of life to compete with the demands of the shifting habitat boundaries. Wolves are so resilient, and can survive on such a wide variety of foods, that when their way of life has been threatened they adapt themselves to altered conditions with an unusual degree of success. At the end of the Ice Age wolves survived in forested and mountainous areas in the face of persecution by man. The forests replaced the tundra with such great rapidity - a matter of a few hundred years - that no other large predator emerged to challenge his dominance.

The slight but appreciable tone of advocacy you might detect in that passage runs through the whole of this book. In Fiennes view, wolves have always been far more sinned against than sinning when it comes to their dealings with man. This may not seem so revelatory a stance in 2011, but forty years ago Barry Lopez's Of Wolves and Men and Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf had barely begun the work of changing the public's mind. Fiction is always stronger, and well into the 1980s the wolf was still being portrayed in novels as a harbinger of destruction. If even ten percent of the millions of people who read Anne Rice's rip-snorting The Vampire Lestat (in which young, headstrong, and still-living Lestat fights off a ravening wolf-pack in one of the book's arresting opening scenes), you can see the size of the job conservationists had in front of them.

At many points throughout his book, Fiennes takes pains to point out that the wolf is not what its press releases would have wary hikers believe:

What we have learned for certain is what the wolf is not: he is not a voracious, ravening predator, who roams the plains and snowscapes in great packs, licking blood-stained lips, tearing down every living thing he can get hold of, and devouring innocent travellers.

Quite coincidentally, Fiennes' book is yet another of those oversized heavily illustrated hardcovers I seem to be mentioning quite often so far this year. There are fascinating black-and-white and color photos on every page - shots of wolves moving through the snowy forests and tundra that are their new favorite hunting-grounds, shots of wolves playing (something they crucially do not only in puppyhood but all through their lives - I've seen adult wolves in the wild play dog-stupid games for an hour at a stretch), and shots of all the wide array of facial and body posture expressions that underscore the main characteristic wolves share in common with humans: they are inveterate and consummate communicators with each other - it's one of the key secrets of their success as a species, and it couldn't be achieved without considerable intelligence:

The brain of the wolf is small by human standards, but nevertheless, if it is compared to the brains of herbivorous animals, it will be seen that the cerebral hemispheres are prolonged at the back so as to cover most of the cerebellum. Wolves are undoubtedly extremely intelligent, and this is probably correlated with the large cerebrum.

The Order of Wolves tries its best to take us inside the world of its subject - not an easy thing to do when that subject orients itself to the world utilizing enormously different primary senses from those of humans. We are so familiar with the fact of these animals' existence that we tend to forget the gap between their senses and our own (the same thing is true in spades about dogs, the full range of whose senses would flat-out astonish even most of the humans who live with them every day). Wolves share with dogs a millennia-old propensity to encourage that forgetting - they require comparatively very little conditioning to become entirely friendly with humans, and that friendliness is always based on accommodation. No cat has ever accommodated a human owner in the history of the world, so it's easier for cats to retain an aura of the mysterious. Dogs - and wolves - are every bit as strange and different from the humans who for good or ill define their existence, but since they're happy to fawn and goof around, the strangeness isn't stressed.

Fiennes revels in it; to him, the magnificent other-ness of wolves is their quintessential charm. Even when he's describing the mechanics of their hunting techniques, he's an obviously avid fan:

Prey animals are followed against the wind, not because the scent carries better but because they are heard better. This may, at first, surprise us from our knowledge of our own hunting dogs, one group of which hunts by sight (in the greyhound group), the other hunting by scent like foxhounds. Yet, fancy a dog lying by the fireside apparently asleep. Suddenly he stirs and cocks his ears. The family has head nothing, but the faithful dog has heard the sounds of his master's car. More, he has distinguished that one care from all the other traffic on the road. So with wolves ...

Despite passages like this one, the ultimate message you take from The Order of Wolves is how different they are from their dog cousins. These are the dogs who didn't come in from the cold, who refused to be changed by human fire and will. Fiennes knows his subject backwards and forwards, and he's too much the scientist to indulge in more than the occasional touch of poetic insight. But nevertheless, he clearly shares the same opinion that so many wolf-experts can't help but have: that in trading their wildness for security, does somehow debased their common heritage with wolves.

No matter where you stand on such an opinion, it seems pretty clear that some are more debased than others ...

The Golden Nature Guide to Birds!

Our book today is a tiny little classic close to my heart: the 1949 Golden Nature Guide to American birds – part of the quietly fantastic Golden Nature Guide series that we'll get around to one of these days here at Stevereads. And this great little book is on my mind this evening for a familiar melancholy reason. Late September and October signal a change in the nature of the bird-world all around us – the population changes. Everybody who's hard-wired to migrate is either gone by now or is all fattened up and ready to go, leaving New England with a sparser nation of birdhood, mostly populated by our hardy year-rounders.

It's the kind of simple observation that's utterly alien to all those of you who wouldn't notice the bird-world if they're lives depended on it, and of course it's to sway and entice those very people. The simple optimism of the book's ethos is wonderful – and, those first editors hoped, contagious: all you need to join the world of birding is a pair of eyes. And that encouragement is couched in 1950s complacency – as an old friend of mine proved to his own satisfaction (and decades-long enjoyment), you can do perfectly well with only a pair of ears.

The book set the template for all those that followed. We get a general introduction to the subject of birds and birding; we get a brief sketch of their natural history; we get a glimpse of their biology; we get that ringing endorsement of the whole concept of simply going outside and watching them (or even staying inside – and this I can attest to as well: the joys of a bird-feeder well-placed for indoor viewing are not to be underestimated); and then we're off to the descriptions.

I've never been able to determine with 100 percent certainty who the unassuming artist was who gave us all the enchanting color illustrations in this Golden Guide. I suspect it was the great Arthur Singer or one of his many disciples, but whoever it was, those little pictures have captivated me for half a century. They're practical purpose is to show at one glance the kind of place you're most likely to encounter the bird starring in the picture – a plowed field for the mourning dove, for instance, or a building ledge (with poop!) for a pigeon, or a picturesque mountain lake for the loon. But for me, they've always had more than practicality to them – they've been discreet little compositions, as self-contained and evocative as an Audobon setting.

Almost all of the Golden Guides are like that to one extent or another – virtually none of them disappoints. But the recurrent theme of the paragraph-long descriptions in the bird guide underscores the emphatic presence of birds, their vibrant uniqueness. Time and again we're told what we're told about, for instance, the red-winged blackbird: that the markings of these birds are incredibly distinctive, impossible to miss or confuse. Of course that's the point of a beginner's guide like this one – it only lists the main examples of the most easily found and observed kinds of birds. Like all Golden Guides, it's main purpose is to encourage.

Most subsequent guide books inadvertently sabotage that encouragement while in the act of facilitating it. They still show you the birds in a typical setting, but they bombard you with half a dozen seasons and plumages and genders and ages. Their goal is laudatory – they want you to be absolutely certain what you're looking at. But the end result more often than not runs counter to intuition – we get a picture featuring the adolescent male and female colorations and fully adult male and female colorations and seasonal colorations, all jammed together into one drawing. It's definitely more comprehensive, but it makes me miss the simplicity of the old guides.

I think about those old guides – and the bird guide in particular – every year when the weather changes and the bite of autumn can be felt in the middle of my kitchen. Even in the depths of the woods surrounding Forest Hills Cemetery, the bird population has thinned and changed. It's not drabber, not at all (that's only the surface appearance to those who don't spend time looking), but nonetheless, there are quite a few people missing, gone on their way to Florida or South America or Africa. The months will feel long until one by one they begin to return, and every year I'm glad I have this guide to tide me over.

The Life of Birds!

Our book today is David Attenborough's masterpiece, The Life of Birds, and for many readers the temptation here will be to conflate the book with the absolutely heartbreakingly good BBC television mini-series, also by Attenborough, to which this book is the companion. A certain amount of this conflation is unavoidable – the book was written in conjunction with the series, after all. But the book is able to go into far more detail, and reading it is a very different experience than watching the TV show. Both experiences are utterly enchanting, but each has its own distinct enchantment.

To put it mildly, there are lots of bird books out there. There are volumes on bird evolution, history, physiology, cognition, and ecological survival. The Life of Birds touches on all of those things, but if it's the single greatest bird book ever written (I contend it is), that's not the reason. Rather, the reason is the entirely unselfconscious way it exults in birds, in the whole world of them. Attenborough has always had a soft spot for birds as a subject matter, and he's famously trekked all over the world to look at, whisper to, and marvel about virtually every kind of bird on the planet. His most charming habit is his immediate identification with his charges in all their infinite variety:

The sun bittern uses visual signals. It builds its nest in swampy regions of the South American rain forest. When it is sitting, it is difficult to detect for its brown plumage, barred with thin wavy stripes of grey, white, and olive, blends in closely with its background. But if you do see it and walk slowly towards it, the bird, most unexpectedly, will fan its tail and spread its wings, revealing on each a bright chestnut patch, edged on the upper side with black and heightened by a surround of glowing gold. The two patches glare at you like a pair of huge eyes. If you stand your ground, the bird will rise and stalk towards you with such confidence that anyone unfamiliar with it might be forgiven for thinking that the creature in front of them was actually dangerous. That, doubtless, is the intended message. It is not, of course, true. The bird is telling a lie.

Readers who come to this book from the mini-series – indeed, from any David Attenborough nature series – will know to expect another aspect too, and they won't be disappointed: in the mini-series and in much greater detail in the book, our author has a penchant for telling us amazing natural history stories we never quite knew before, like the unbelievable birth of the humble megapode:

Of all the ground-nesting birds, the most swiftly independent is the infant megapode. Its incubation period is particularly long – sixty to eighty days. The egg, being buried in a mound, does not have to withstand being rolled around and sat on, as eggs in nests must be able to do. Accordingly, it has one of the thinnest of shells and the chick is able to break its way without much effort. Indeed, although some three weeks before it hatches, the little egg tooth begins to develop on its beak, this come to nothin and soon disappears unused. The megapode chick is the only bird that manages to break out of its shell without the assistance of such a tool. But the task that it next faces is a very exhausting one. Above it lies a foot or so of earth. Lying on its back, it kicks out with its feet which, like those of its parents, are disproportionately large. As it loosens the earth, it humps its back and wriggles so that dislodged soil is pushed beneath it and it slowly moves upward. All this activity is fuelled entirely by the remains of the huge yolk which lies in its infant stomach. It will take several days to dig its way up to the surface, but by the time it does arrive there, it is a totally independent individual with a full complement of feathers that are so well developed that it is able to fly immediately.

And The Life of Birds, like all Attenborough's marvellous books (cynicism would guess that they're all factory-written by interns and assistants and then polished by the man himself, but since such cynicism makes the same claim about the speeches and histories of Winston Churchill, I'm content no matter what the truth of it may end up being), has something often sorely lacking from other fact-filled works of natural history: sweep. His books take on big subjects and never let us forget how big they are. The many amazing species of birds in these pages are living in some of the most dramatic ways of any life-form on Earth, and all of that drama is captured perfectly here, as in this passage about the great crowds of emperor penguins incubating their eggs while their females are off in the northern oceans feeding:

As the winter winds begin to blow, the days darken, the temperatures fall, and the emperors huddle closer and closer together. The blizzards increase in severity, the wind screams across the ice at 100 miles an hour and the males huddle still closer, their beaks drawn down to their chests so that the napes of their necks, pressed tightly together, form a feathered roof with scarcely a gap between them. They have nothing to eat. Mid-winter comes and for a month there is total darkness, except for the shifting veils and curtains of the Southern Lights playing overhead.

I can't recommend The Life of Birds highly enough, whether you've seen the mini-series of the same name or not (of course, I can't recommend the mini-series highly enough either, but that would be a different blog altogether). The world's most remarkable animal is not man (nor, alas, is it dog), and that most remarkable kind has its greatest portrait here.

The Grizzly Maze!

Our book today is The Grizzly Maze, Nick Jans’ 2006 account of Timothy Treadwell, the self-proclaimed grizzly guru who spent years on Alaska’s Katmai coast filming himself walking around its population of bears, talking to them, even singing to them, all the while talking about them to the video camera operated by his girlfriend Amie Hugenard. Treadwell believed that the bears had received bad press over the years, stigmatized as enormous, short-tempered killing machines, and he claimed his goal was to use his videos to instruct people (especially school kids, with whom he was very popular) in the true nature of wild bears – and to curb poaching while he was at it, a claim scoffed at by all the experts Jans interviews in his book. One of them puts it like this:

He never saw one poacher - I don’t think he even knew what a poacher looked like. And if he had run into someone that desperate to hunt illegally in the park, they would have shot him, stuffed him in a crab pot, and he would have just disappeared. That business of his was a total fabrication.

But of course it’s not his videos or his conservation efforts – such as they were – that made Treadwell famous. No, his brief, problematic immortality came along a route only he would have found unexpected: in 2003 both he and his Hugenard were mauled and then eaten by one of Katmai’s bears. The story became a world-wide sensation, in part because Hugenard pressed the ‘record’ button on the video camera’s audio and so caught the whole six minutes of Treadwell’s death and her own, and in part because of the easy irony that surrounded the whole thing.

One of the main strengths of Jans’ book is the fact that he was able to get normally-reserved experts and field specialists to open up about Treadwell after his death. Virtually all of these experts then immediately apologize for doing so, but their exasperation is mercilessly evident, as when Jans suggests that, for all his faults, Treadwell must have had a ‘way’ with bears:

You must be joking! He was an absolute disaster with bears. You’ve been to Katmai – you’ve seen it yourself. Those bears are so tolerant, so laid back, you could have a day care center out there. No one’s ever been killed in Katmai, not ever. I don’t know how he managed, but he finally goaded a bear into it … Did Tim Treadwell teach me anything about bears? Yeah, it was an incredible testament to their patience. Look, there are only two reasons, from a mature bear’s point of view, why any creature would approach it closely – to mate with it or displace it. That’s the message he was constantly sending bears: I want to hump you or I want to chase you off.

(Equally devastating is the response when Jans suggests that from all accounts, Treadwell at least seemed like a nice guy:

Nice? Nice? Everybody’s nice. That’s not the point here. The measure of a person isn’t how nice they are – it’s what they actually do in the world. A bank robber might be pleasant and funny if you meet him on the street.)

But the dark centerpiece of this book – of any book on Treadwell – must be a re-staging of his horrific death, and here The Grizzly Maze is involuntarily captivating. We can’t know the precise details of that fateful encounter, although it’s possible to infer a lot from the sounds of that tape (which was recovered, preserved, and then tastefully removed from most of the Internet).  Although bears often bluff or change their minds, we know this attack was severe from the very start (as Jans points out, Treadwell had been around bears for years and seen a great many of their squabbles with each other, so when he calls out to his girlfriend – clearly audible on the tape – “I’m being killed out here!” – we can assume he knew exactly what he was talking about). We can guess that Treadwell of all people was hopeful of a happy ending even after the initial violence, although Jans points out a haunting alternative:

It could be, though, that things happen much faster. Timothy steps out and instantly senses that this time IS different. He knows this bear. And he knows it means to kill him. He looks the animal in the eye, six feet away, and understands it’s over. There’s scarcely time for that realization to blur past before the bear is on him.

There’s an element here of sheer physical terror, mainly due to sheer speed, an aspect of bears most non-hikers tend to forget. In the world of predatory mammals, once you decide to attack, you give it everything you’ve got. Humans – constantly hoping to avoid injury – seldom reach that point as quickly or entirely as other large mammals, and the gap is always disorienting, as is the gap in raw power involved:

The speed and force of a grizzly attack is overwhelming. Like being hit by a truck doing sixty. Or an avalanche. What many survivors of a mauling recall is the sheer explosion of power that tears into them, sweeps them along like a scrap of paper. One woman describes being grabbed, shaken, and thrown into a tree; anther victim says the most painful and lasting injury he suffered was the deep bruising caused by the bear’s snout slamming into his chest.

The audio tape here is roughly six minutes long, and Treadwell is screaming for about four of those minutes. The bear initially mauls him then retreats (a common practice among bears – if you’re attacked and you do everything you’re supposed to, curling up on the ground, protecting your head and neck, staying still, and the bear leaves, for Heaven’s sake, stay still awhile… the bear is almost certainly watching) – Jans speculates that Hugenard may have rushed out to tend to Treadwell’s injuries. But the bear comes back, and the audio records a deeply disturbing scenario: Treadwell’s cries seem to fade – not because he’s getting weaker (as Jans points out, he’s denied the boon of shock or quick unconsciousness), but because he’s being dragged off into the bush, to be eaten at leisure.  For the moment, Hugenard is left alone in the middle of the destroyed camp site, with splatters of fresh blood on the ground all around her.

When the bear returns for her, the tape is still running. Her screams don’t sound human, but then, there was probably very little of the human being left in her by that point.

Jans has done a masterful job in telling a story that should never have needed telling in the first place. Every time I read a book like this, a part of me hopes it’s the last such book I’ll ever read, the last account of some idiot provoking a wild animal to kill him and thereby bringing more misery and death on wild animals just in general. But those books keep coming, mainly because idiots are in no short supply.

The Red Hourglass!

Our book today is Gordon Grice’s mesmerizing 1998 thriller The Red Hourglass: The Lives of Predators. This is electrifying, horrifying stuff – Grice takes a close look at the predatory tactics and the encounter-lore of a few common predators in the natural world: spiders, snakes, mantids, and, interestingly, pigs and dogs. We get brief, intense natural histories of the black widow, the tarantula, the rattlesnake, and – in this great book’s most indelible chapter, the brown recluse spider. And like all the best strong, impressive writing, it has unintended side-effects: after you finish The Red Hourglass, you won’t pay an anxiety-free visit to your basement, patio, or attic – to say nothing of the great outdoors – for about a year. And this effect is evergreen: reread the book after many months, and you’ll still be out for another full year.

Part of the secret to this dark magic is the fact that Grice picks omnipresent creatures as his subjects, rather than, say, the great white shark or the grizzly bear. He picks animals you often don’t have to make any special effort to meet (especially if you live in the American West and Southwest). In fact, reading his book you’re reminded of that old saw of natural history books, that no matter where you’re doing your reading, you’re probably not more than five feet from a spider of one variety or another. In the grip of The Red Hourglass, you’ll become certain all of those watching spiders are venomous.

He studies the black widow spider as a passionate amateur who’s caught and kept several throughout his life and never been bitten. He recounts in fearful detail the agonies healthy adults tend to experience upon being bitten, and you can tell he revels in the fact that genuine mysteries lurk in the exact method of that agony:

The venom contains a neurotoxin that accounts for the pain and the system-wide effects like roller-coaster blood pressure. But this chemical explanation only opens the door to deeper mysteries. A dose of the venom contains only a few molecules of the neurotoxin, which has a high molecular weight – in fact, the molecules are large enough to be seen under an ordinary microscope. How do these few molecules manage to affect the entire body of an animal weighing hundreds or even thousands of pounds? No one has explained the specific mechanism. It seems to involve a neural cascade, a series of reactions initiated by the toxin, but with the toxin not directly involved in any but the first steps of the process. The toxin somehow flips a switch that activates a self-torture mechanism.

There’s the same grisly, respectful fascination in the chapter on rattlesnakes – he points out what anybody who’s spent any time in out west will confirm: each rattler’s personality is different. Some will go out of their way to avoid even indirect proximity with humans, while others will seek out a confrontation. Some are meek, others flagrantly aggressive (although Grice keeps his focus pretty much squarely on the United States, this same dichotomy is true of the cobras of India – except for the part about any of them being meek). And all are potentially harmful, even the young:

Rattlesnakes are born venomous. They can already hunt for themselves. My father once reached into a patch of grass and was struck on the fingernail by a baby rattlesnake. The nail eventually blackened and fell off. He suffered no other effects. Some people claim young rattlesnakes are more toxic than adults. Possibly the explanation for this paradox is that young rattlesnakes show less restraint in using up their supplies of venom when biting defensively. A certain medical student, assuming the young harmless, handled one. He showed off for friends, telling them how ironic it is that such an emblem of fear could be handled freely. That’s the way most people get bitten: an urge to handle fire. These days the young doctor has nine fingers.

The curveball of The Red Hourglass is its inclusion of pigs and dogs, two species most people might not at first classify as predators. The chapter on pigs does scarce justice to their gentle intelligence, but to be fair, Grice spends most of its pages talking about wild boars. And the chapter on dogs … well, it has some interesting personal recollections about sharing a town with a large pack of feral dogs, but as for the rest-let’s just say Man’s Best Friend continues to be one of natural history’s most persistent mysteries (which is another way of saying what we’ve said many times before here at Stevereads: dog-writing done by people who aren’t me tends to have lots of problems). My biggest chuckle is always the part where Grice interviews a man in Special Forces training who talks to him about facing a canine guard dog in mano-a-pawo combat:

Your big dogs go for the throat. I’m talking Doberman, German shepherd, most of the ones used as attack dogs. You put your arm up to protect your throat. You let him bite your arm, but you fall back with his momentum. As you fall, you put your other forearm just behind his head. As your back hits the ground, you’re bringing your knees and feet up to push him up over your head. Basically you’re giving him a monkey flip, and you’re holding your arms rigid. His mouth is hooked onto one arm, the other’s behind his neck, and as he flips his momentum snaps his spine. One dead dog. Not hard to do, but you have to sacrifice your arm. You’re okay if you’re wearing a thick jacket. If not, your arm gets pretty torn up. You could bleed to death.

Hee. See? I’m chuckling again. So the thing you learn in Special Forces training is that when you’re attacked by a large guard dog (the elasticity of whose neck muscles and tendons is roughly four times that of a human), the first thing you should do is lay down on your back and expose your abdomen and genitals. Why, that’s downright sensible! You know, sometimes I think the much-vaunted ‘Special Forces training’ we civilians hear so much about consists entirely of learning how to bullshit on epic levels. I’m 100 percent certain no Special Forces op ever used this preposterous ‘let me wrestle with you before you disembowel me’ tactic, but I’m equally certain the guy Grice interviewed told it all to him with a straight face and an earnest voice. That’s expert training for you.

Grice accurately reports that dogs are second only to humans as killers of humans – their sheer ubiquity makes virtually every human around them careless, so the fatalities are much higher than those of black widows or tarantulas or rattlesnakes. And fatalities aren’t really even the main issue in the book’s most grotesque and striking chapter, on the humble brown recluse spider. The brown recluse is exactly the kind of crack-and-crevice-dwelling creature you could almost certainly find in your room right there at home, if you were foolish enough to go looking. It’s a shy, retiring creature, but its venom contains an even bigger mystery than the extreme toxicity of the black widow’s bite. The bite of the brown recluse doesn’t poison flesh: it kills it. And the toxins involved somehow prevent the body’s natural systems from cleaning the wound – with the result that bite victims often have an open, suppurating gap of dead flesh to deal with for the rest of their lives, from a bite so tiny nobody ever remembers getting bitten. Grice finishes his gruesome, hypnotic book with his account of this animal and its bizarre defense:

The flesh affected by a recluse’s necrosis never heals. Somehow, the venom turns off the immune system and the body’s capacity for repairing itself in that patch of flesh. The victim can only hope the dead area stays small. But sometimes it doesn’t.

Despite its disturbing subject matter, The Red Hourglass is a book you should most definitely read. Grice is a master prose stylist with a perfect ear for the pace of drama. Just be prepared, once you’re done with the book, to live in a less comfortable world for about a year.

Salt Tide!

Our book today is Curtis Badger’s 1993 Salt Tide, a quiet little masterpiece fit to share shelf-space with The House on Nauset Marsh (and yes, to those of you who’ve written – privately, of course – asking: John and Mildred Teal’s The Life and Death of a Salt Marsh would most certainly also be on that shelf). Badger is exactly the kind of guide and explicator we most want in such a book: a passionate amateur who’s been besotted with salt marshes his entire life.

The particular salt marshes in question here are the innumerable and incredibly picturesque barrier beaches and islands that stretch south in a narrow sprit from the Virginia/Maryland border and separate the Atlantic Ocean from Chesapeake Bay. Badger explored these marshes and studied their wildlife for years before writing Salt Tide, and the book shows it: this is a rich, conversational, quietly passionate hymn of praise not just to a fragile, endangered ecosystem but, like The House on Nauset Marsh, an entire way of life that seems doomed to vanish, crowded out of existence by louder, faster, cruder ways.

Badger’s book is the best kind of natural history: it’s totally sincere, casually informative, and positively bursting with little epiphanies. Anybody who’s ever spent time on out on marshes will recognize most of these epiphanies and greet them like old friends, as with Badger’s little description of the joy of going by canoe:

I like most of all the first few moments of a canoe trip, when you leave land and glide through water, testing the balance of the boat, getting the feel of things. It’s like being weightless. You look up and see the sky and you look down and see the sky reflected in the water. You’re floating, and only a gentle wake defines the margin of air and water. It’s a pleasure to leave land and its firmness; to glide through water seems so effortless – one pull on the paddle and away you go. The transformation is sudden, and it is a delight.

Or the peculiar joy at the return of a homely harbinger:

The flounder’s great value is that it gives us our first excuse of the year to leave the warmth of home and hearth and get out there, to be buffeted by spring northeasters, to endure the wet and cold and fishless days sane people avoid. The first flounder of spring is cause for celebration, because it is a tangible reminder that the cycle of seasons grinds on, ensuring us that the gray days of winter are retreating and that better times lie ahead.

Salt Tide is full of carefully-learned animal lore disseminated always in a tone of wonder and, often, a reserved tone of humor. There are long digressions on cordgrass, piping plovers, salting fish, and of course, considering the proximity of the once-mighty Chesapeake, clams:

The remarkable thing about the clam’s odyssey is that it reproduces, grows, avoids predators, selects a healthy home environment, and develops a discriminatory palate without conscious thought. The clam has no brain. It is a digestive and reproductive system unhobbled by fear, conscience, greed, envy, ambition. All it knows is food and sex. Hence, perhaps, the saying “Happy as a clam.”

And all of this learning and passion and humor is here harnessed into a pointed plea, although Badger is never strident or doctrinaire about it. He doesn’t just love these marshes and barrier islands, he believes in them – their conservation, their uniqueness, the dynamic purposes they serve:

It is a wonderfully productive system. Not only do the islands protect the mainland from storms, but also the marshes and shallow bays provide homes for many species of fish, shellfish, mollusks, migrating waterfowl, and shorebirds. Acre for acre, the salt marsh is one of the most productive natural systems on earth; it is a giant protein factory that supports a wide variety of life, ranging from microscopic zooplankton to those of us at the top of the food chain.

That passion fills the book and helps even the most sedentary, landlocked reader to love the salt marshes too. For those of us who’ve spent a good deal of time slogging and hiking and especially canoeing along such quiet, aromatic waterways, Salt Tide is even better, serving, as does The House on Nauset Marsh, as a never-changing repository for cherished memories in the face of relentless change.

Badger is so fervently caught up in the life and death of his own salt marshes that he can easily envision himself as part of that cycle:

… I think that when I die I would like to become part of the salt marsh estuary. Scatter my ashes over the marsh and the creek water, and put my old body back in circulation. Don’t put me in an expensive satin-lined box and drop the box into a concrete vault six feet under. No, I’d rather be returned to these waters, to the grasses and the phytoplankton, where there is no such thing as death, only the cycles of life. Make my marker a lush stand of cordwood grass. Watch it wave in the breeze, observe how it catches the light of the fall, and think of me.

It’s a pretty picture, and like the rest of this gentle, wonderstruck book, it’ll leave you smiling and happy and just a bit wistful. If you happen to find it in your used book travels, snap it up. And if you happen to find yourself anywhere near a well-channeled salt marsh, rent a canoe and go see for yourself.

The World of the Porcupine!

Our book today is from 1966 – it’s David Costello’s The World of the Porcupine, part of Lippincott’s great old line of “Living World Books” covering nearly a dozen iconic and intriguing North American animals (should you be trolling online, Leonard Lee Rue’s volumes on the beaver and raccoon are particularly good as well, as is The World of the Great Horned Owl by Ronald Austing and John Holt). The subject of this particular volume, Erethizon dorsatum, had been an object of study for Costello for many years before he wrote his book – and object of study and sympathy.

Those of you who’ve never encountered a porcupine in the wild or in person might wonder why this critter would need a writer’s sympathy. After all, the porcupine is not a skunk (to the best of my knowledge, there is not “Living World Book” on the poor misunderstood skunk) – its quills might make it a figure of some concern to owners of over-curious dogs or cattle (using pliers to pluck thirty quills out of a howling beagle’s nose is not, trust me, a pleasant experience), but that concern is never the reflexive disgust many urban Americans feel for, say, the skunk or the bat. And porcupines aren’t endangered or especially popular in the black market meat trade. So why the need for sympathy?

Costello clearly feels it, just as clearly as he feels affection for his prickly charges. His descriptions throughout the book are delightfully personal and immediate, as when he discusses a fact about porcupines well known to anybody who’s ever been around them – the fact that they never shut up:

At times, even its voice leads to its undoing. Like a mumbling old man it sometimes announces its presence around camps at night and in the woods during the mating season. The porcupine does have a voice, and it has many variations and meanings. I have heard them murmuring beyond the shadow of my campfire from Yellowstone National Park south to Arizona and west to Oregon. Some of their sounds have been almost inaudible grunts. Others have been a pitiful whining, which by no means meant that the animal was in distress.

I have never heard a porcupine give the coo-coo-coo sound or the weak high yipping bark that others have described. But I have cuddled their babies in my hands and heard them murmur and grunt like an overfed puppy dog.

(That bit about cuddling is not exaggeration: I once knew someone in the Midwest who had, in addition to three house dogs, a 20-pound porcupine as a pet. The sedate creature would waddle from room to room, mumbling like it had lost its car keys, matter-of-factly hauling itself up onto its owner’s lap for a nap – in every way an adorable, completely adapted house pet)(I of course spent much more of my time with the aforementioned dogs – for what it’s worth, once they actually started talking to me instead of slurping my face, they had only one unanimous topic in mind: would I please, please help them to kill and eat that porcupine?)

So again one might wonder: why the need for sympathy? Why the special pleading tone throughout Costello’s book?

The reason stems from another well-known quality of the American porcupine (the larger and more aggressive African variety is an entirely different kettle of fish), a quality Costello is at some pains to declare a myth. He himself uses delightfully euphemistic phrases like “experts in the art of relaxation,” but his book is too accurate to avoid the imputations that legions of hunters, trappers, gamesmen, and amateur observers have put upon this species. It makes Costello defensive:

In spite of the porcupine’s quills and its deliberate actions, it is not the animal moron so often described in the hunting magazines and forestry literature. In fact, it is a rather sensitive creature which responds to patience, kindness, and firmness when handled by people.

Costello points out that captive porcupines have been observed solving intricate lock-and-key puzzles as fast or faster than cats or monkeys solved the same puzzles. He talks at length about their extensive vocal repertoire. He testifies to the agile wits of the creatures he’s owned himself. But time and again in his accounts, other people – people who don’t know each other, people with no reason to lie, will make nearly identical-sounding comments that almost always feature phrases like “dull, witless, and generally unaware of its surroundings …”

The World of the Porcupine will certainly have you rooting for these lovable butterballs who just happen to be covered in 30,000 razor-sharp and easily-detachable quills. You may even end up believing Costello about their misunderestimated cognitive abilities. Me, I’m not convinced. I observed that porcupine in the Midwest in close proximity with three dogs for several days, and I have to say: they came off looking like a trio of Rhodes scholars by comparison. I’m the biggest fan of Canis familiaris there is, but even I have to admit: any animal that can make three dopey farm-hounds look smart probably deserves its reputation for being the dimmest bulb in the chandelier.

Still, should you encounter it (or any of its shelf-mates) at a dusty flea market some day, don’t miss the book. It’s great fun, regardless of contested intelligence quotients.