Showing posts with label nature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nature. Show all posts
Jan 8, 2019
Nov 8, 2018
Sep 14, 2018
May 1, 2017
Jan 7, 2017
Jun 1, 2016
Nov 11, 2015
Tap the magic tree - Christie Matheson
Booklist Reviews
"There's magic in this bare brown tree. Tap it once. Turn the page to see." Tapping the page, and rubbing and touching starts the fun of watching a bare tree sprout one leaf, then many, then buds, flowers, and finally apples. After jiggling, wiggling, and swishing the pages, the flower petals fall and apples appear; shaking the book causes the apples to drop with a "Plop! Plop! Plop!" Whooshing makes the leaves cascade, and clapping causes snowflakes to flutter down. The tree is bare and brown again, but "Be patient . . . Close your eyes and count to ten," and the mystery begins again with two bluebirds building their nest in the spring. When each season changes, a full page of color introduces it—green flows to pink to red to orange to wintery blue and white. Although simple in presentation with ample white space, the artwork provides a glorious rendition of the four seasons of a tree. No iPad is needed to make this interactive book totally satisfying. Pair with Lizi Boyd's Inside Outside (2013), another seasonal interactive title. Copyright 2013 Booklist Reviews.
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Feb 5, 2015
Hummingbirds - Ronald Orenstein
Summary: "A visual feast of beautiful images and a comprehensive natural history of a unique and remarkable bird family."--P. [4] of cover.
Publishers Weekly Reviews
This perfect coffee table book captures the dazzling and fascinating world of the remarkable hovering bird unique to the Americas. Author Ronald Orenstein, a zoologist, lawyer and wild life conservationist, explains in layman's terms many characteristics of hummingbirds, from ?ight and feeding techniques to migrations and mating patterns. There are more than 340 species of hummingbirds divided into seven groupings with illustrative names like Mangoes, Coquettes, Brilliants, Mountain Gems, Bees, Emerald and Giant. Readers will learn about their diverse habitat, unique metabolisms, courtship prowess and near mythical attraction in pre-Columbian lore of the Americas, and may be surprised to discover that hummingbirds while resting enter a state of hibernation-like torpor to conserve body heat. The spectacular photography of Michael and Patricia Fogden reveals the diversity, beautiful colors and movement of these unique birds. They successfully captured images of the speedy birds in ?ight, perched, nesting, feeding and, in an exceptional set of photographs, even escaping the fangs of a viper. Although extremely resilient and adaptive, the hummingbird environment is often threatened by development and deforestation and the final chapter focuses on these issues. (Sept.)
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Feb 1, 2014
The big burn - Timothy Egan
The big burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the fire that saved America - Timothy Egan
Summary: Narrates the struggles of the overmatched rangers against the implacable fire of August, 1910, and Teddy Roosevelt's pioneering conservation efforts that helped turn public opinion permanently in favor of the forests, though it changed the mission of the forest service with consequences felt in the fires of today.
BookPage Reviews
The recent “Station Fire” in California’s Angeles National Forest, the worst in Los Angeles County history, burned more than 160,000 acres and killed two firefighters. In comparison, the 1910 Northern Rockies forest fire remembered in The Big Burn covered nearly 3.2 million acres in Washington, Idaho and Montana. At least 85 people were killed, most of them members of ill-trained firefighting crews. That blowout, the biggest wildfire in American history, devastated the economy of a booming timber and mining region. It traumatized the survivors—and as New York Times columnist Timothy Egan shows in The Big Burn, it set the course for U.S. forest conservation for the next hundred years, for good and ill. The national forests that burned were brand new, the product of President Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation crusade. Spurred on by fellow aristocrat Gifford Pinchot, the founding head of the National Forest Service, Roosevelt had worked at breakneck pace to protect millions of acres from logging, railroad and mine companies. But when Roosevelt left office, the land barons’ allies in his own party starved the Forest Service of resources, and forced out Pinchot. The scope of the disaster and the heroism of so many forest rangers turned public opinion in favor of conservation at a crucial moment. National forests were subsequently created throughout the country, and the Forest Service became a thriving agency. For his National Book Award-winning account of the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time, Egan was able to interview survivors. For The Big Burn, he had to comb through Forest Service reports, memoirs and old newspapers. But he’s equally effective here in telling the story through individuals—the homesteaders, the fire crews of immigrants and drifters, the idealistic Ivy League grads who followed Pinchot’s siren call to the Forest Service. Egan is a gorgeous writer. His chapters on the “blowup,” when thousands fled burning towns and desperate fire crews burrowed in mine shafts or submerged in streams to escape the inferno, should become a classic account of an American Pompeii. Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.
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Dec 2, 2013
Wait! Wait! - Hatsue Nakawaki
Summary: A gentle celebration of a very young child's introduction to the natural world combines sparse, repetitive text and delicate illustrations depicting a child who encounters small animals, birds and insects that rapidly swoop away until the child's parent appears, revealing how loved ones will always return. - (Baker & Taylor)
Booklist Reviews
In this gentle book for very young children, a toddler is playing outdoors, enchanted by the living things he sees. First a butterfly flutters by, but—"Wait! Wait!"—it swoops up into the air. Then a lizard crawls by, but—"Wait! Wait!"—it too disappears, wiggling off into a crevice near the sidewalk. Next pecking pigeons flap and fly away. Finally, two cats "Meow. Meow. Meow" away from the little one's outstretched arms. When Dad picks up the tot by the tummy, his little body makes a U shape as he stretches his arms down to reach for all the exciting things he sees. With a final "Here we go!" Dad scoops the tot up onto his shoulders as they continue their walk through the park. Delicate illustrations in acrylics and oil pencils on white backgrounds echo the spare quality of some Japanese artwork, and the sweetly expressive features and movements show Sakai's ability to accurately portray the actions and emotions of a child just beginning to explore the world. Copyright 2013 Booklist Reviews.
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Apr 1, 2013
Into the wild (DVD)
Into the wild (DVD)
Summary: Freshly graduated from college with a promising future ahead, Christopher McCandless walked out of his privileged life and into the wild in search of adventure. What happened to him on the way transformed this young wanderer into an enduring symbol for countless people - a fearless risk-taker who wrestled with the precarious balance between man and nature. Based on a true story.
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Jun 1, 2012
A thousand-mile walk to the Gulf - John Muir
Summary: In 1867, John Muir, age twenty-eight, was blinded in an industrial accident. He lay in bed for two weeks wondering if he would ever see again. When his sight miraculously returned, Muir resolved to devote all his time to the great passion of his life -- studying plants. He quit his job in an Indiana manufacturing plant, said good-bye to his family, and set out alone to walk to the Gulf of Mexico, sketching tropical plants along the way. He kept a journal of this thousand-mile walk and near the end of his life, now famous as a conservation warrior and literary celebrity, sent a typescript of it to his publisher. The result is a wonderful portrait of a young man in search of himself and a particularly vivid portrait of the post-war American South. Here is the young Muir talking with freed slaves and former Confederate soldiers, pondering the uses of electricity, exploring Mammoth Cave, sleeping in a Savannah cemetery, delirious with malarial fever in the home of strangers at Cedar Key, traveling to Havana, Cuba, and sailing to San Francisco Bay. Once in California, Muir promptly set out for Yosemite Valley -- 200 miles away. There Muir found his destiny -- and a mountain range to test his apparently inexhaustible capacity for walking. A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf bridges two Muir classics: The Story of My Boyhood and Youth and My First Summer in the Sierra
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Jun 1, 2010
Birdology - Sy Montgomery
Birdology : Lessons from a Pack of Hens, a Peck of Pigeons, Cantankerous Crows, Fierce Falcons, Hip Hop Parrots, Baby Hummingbirds, and One Murderously Big Living Dinosaur - Montgomery, Sy
Summary: Combines popular science with personal anecdotes as the author describes her encounters with a range of avian personalities from various parts of the world. - (Baker & Taylor)
Staff Review
This terrific book, by the same author as "The good, good, pig", was fascinating. Who knew that when I'm feeding jays peanuts by hand that I actually have a dinosaur in my hand! Sy Montgomery is a fantastic naturalist who has been researching her subject since childhood, and shares with us her amazing knowledge.
May 3, 2010
Crow planet: essential wisdom from the urban wilderness - Lyanda Lynn Haupt
Crow planet: essential wisdom from the urban wilderness - Haupt, Lyanda Lynn
Summary: A scholarly tribute to crow life and mythology explains how increasing crow populations are reflecting various ecological imbalances while providing opportunities to connect with the animal world.
Kirkus Reviews
A self-described posthippie ecofeminist offers a quiet, genial book of "hopeful possibility" amid the current ecological crisis. Wildlife researcher and rehabilitator Haupt (Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent: The Importance of Everything and Other Lessons from Darwin's Lost Notebooks, 2006, etc.) writes gracefully about the interactions between crows and humans in the urban landscape and what those interactions portend for the future of the zoöpolis (where human and animal geographies overlap). For most people, notes the author, crows are the most commonly encountered native wild animal. Her fascination with the unusually intelligent birds began after a long depressive funk. One day she looked out her study window, saw an injured fledgling perched on an electrical wire and took the bird in. While nursing it back to health, she began to feel better. Haupt then spent two years studying the shiny black songbirds in her backyard and neighborhood. Found in growing numbers—there are more than 30 million in the United States—in densely populated towns and suburbs, the omnivorous American Crow thrives on the detritus of modern urban life, consuming everything from road kill to bread crumbs, bagels and McDonald's fries. The author discovered that watching the creatures mate, nest, forage and help one another encouraged a necessary awareness of the continuity between human lives and that of other species. Like her beloved Thoreau—who wrote, "There is no wildness distant from ourselves"—Haupt celebrates the interconnectedness of all life and urges readers to pay close attention to their home places. The chapter on the habits of amateur urban naturalists is a neat how-to guide for anyone interested in learning how the wild, nonhuman animals around us live. Even though we are unable to view our entire planet, she writes, we can take positive action by cultivating a sense of wonder at the wildlife at our door: "We practice wonder by resisting the temptation to hurry past things worth seeing." A fresh take on conscious living in the everyday world. Copyright Kirkus 2009 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.
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