BIRDS AND BOOKS READING GROUP
Archives of all the Books we've read by year
In case you want to find a book to read about Birds, Nature, Evolution, Adventure....
Archives of all the Books we've read by year
In case you want to find a book to read about Birds, Nature, Evolution, Adventure....
2019 BIRDS AND BOOKS
January 15, 2019
LIVING ON THE WIND: ACROSS THE HEMISPHERE WITH MIGRATORY BIRDS
by Scott Weidensaul
Bird migration is the world's only true unifying natural phenomenon, stitching the continents together in a way that even the great weather systems fail to do. Scott Weidensaul follows awesome kettles of hawks over the Mexican coastal plains, bar-tailed godwits that hitchhike on gale winds 7,000 miles nonstop across the Pacific from Alaska to New Zealand, and myriad songbirds whose numbers have dwindled so dramatically in recent decades. Migration paths form an elaborate global web that shows serious signs of fraying, and Weidensaul delves into the tragedies of habitat degradation and deforestation with an urgency that brings to life the vast problems these miraculous migrants now face. Living on the Wind is a magisterial work of nature writing.
Paperback, 420 pages Published April 15th 2000 by North Point Press (first published 1999)
Original Title Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere With Migratory Birds
ISBN 0865475911 (ISBN13: 9780865475915)
February 19, 2019
MOZART’S STARLING by Lyanda Lynn Haupt
Goodreads: On May 27th, 1784, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart met a flirtatious little starling who sang (an improved version of!) the theme from his Piano Concerto Number 17 in G to him. Knowing a kindred spirit when he met one, Mozart wrote "That was wonderful" in his journal and took the bird home to be his pet. For three years Mozart and his family enjoyed the uniquely delightful company of the starling until one fitful April when the bird passed away.
In 2013, Lyanda Lynn Haupt, author of Crow Planet, rescued her own starling, Carmen, who has become a part of her family. In Mozart's Starling, Haupt explores the unlikely bond between one of history's most controversial characters and one of history's most notoriously disliked birds. Part natural history, part story, Mozart's Starling will delight readers as they learn about language, music, and the secret world of starlings.
Paperback: 288 pages Publisher: Back Bay Books; Reprint edition (May 15, 2018) ISBN-10: 0316370908 ISBN-13: 978-0316370905
March 19, 2019
COYOTE AMERICA: A NATURAL AND SUPERNATURAL HISTORY by Dan Flores
Finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
Legends don't come close to capturing the incredible story of the coyote In the face of centuries of campaigns of annihilation employing gases, helicopters, and engineered epidemics, coyotes didn't just survive, they thrived, expanding across the continent from Alaska to New York. In the war between humans and coyotes, coyotes have won, hands-down. Coyote America is the illuminating five-million-year biography of this extraordinary animal, from its origins to its apotheosis. It is one of the great epics of our time.
Hardcover, 271 pages Published June 7th 2016 by Basic Books
ISBN 0465052991 (ISBN13: 9780465052998)
April 16, 2019
THE BIG BURN: TEDDY ROOSEVELT AND THE FIRE THAT SAVED AMERICA
by Timothy Egan
On the afternoon of August 20, 1910, a battering ram of wind moved through the drought-stricken national forests of Washington, Idaho, and Montana, whipping the hundreds of small blazes burning across the forest floor into a roaring inferno that jumped from treetop to ridge as it raged, destroying towns and timber in the blink of an eye. Forest rangers had assembled nearly ten thousand men — college boys, day workers, immigrants from mining camps — to fight the fire. But no living person had seen anything like those flames, and neither the rangers nor anyone else knew how to subdue them.
Egan narrates the struggles of the overmatched rangers against the implacable fire with unstoppable dramatic force. Equally dramatic is the larger story he tells of outsized president Teddy Roosevelt and his chief forester, Gifford Pinchot. Pioneering the notion of conservation, Roosevelt and Pinchot did nothing less than create the idea of public land as our national treasure, owned by and preserved for every citizen. The robber barons fought Roosevelt and Pinchot’s rangers, but the Big Burn saved the forests even as it destroyed them: the heroism shown by the rangers turned public opinion permanently in their favor and became the creation myth that drove the Forest Service, with consequences still felt in the way our national lands are protected — or not — today.
Hardcover, 336 pages Published October 1st 2009 by Houghton Mifflin
Original Title The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America
ISBN 0618968415 (ISBN13: 9780618968411)
May 16, 2019
SOUL OF AN OCTOPUS: A SURPRISING EXPLORATION INTO THE WONDER OF CONSCIOUSNESS by Sy Montgomery
In pursuit of the wild, solitary, predatory octopus, popular naturalist Sy Montgomery has practiced true immersion journalism. From New England aquarium tanks to the reefs of French Polynesia and the Gulf of Mexico, she has befriended octopuses with strikingly different personalities—gentle Athena, assertive Octavia, curious Kali, and joyful Karma. Each creature shows her cleverness in myriad ways: escaping enclosures like an orangutan; jetting water to bounce balls; and endlessly tricking companions with multiple “sleights of hand” to get food.
Scientists have only recently accepted the intelligence of dogs, birds, and chimpanzees but now are watching octopuses solve problems and are trying to decipher the meaning of the animal’s color-changing techniques. With her “joyful passion for these intelligent and fascinating creatures” (Library Journal Editors’ Spring Pick), Montgomery chronicles the growing appreciation of this mollusk as she tells a unique love story. By turns funny, entertaining, touching, and profound, The Soul of an Octopus reveals what octopuses can teach us about the meeting of two very different minds.
Hardcover, 261 pages Published May 12th 2015 by Atria Books
ISBN 1451697716 (ISBN13: 9781451697711)
JUNE 20, 2019
Raising Wild: Dispatches from a Home in the Wilderness by Michael Branch
Combining natural history, humor, and personal narrative, Raising Wild is an intimate exploration of Nevada's Great Basin Desert, the wild and extreme land of high desert caliche and juniper, of pronghorn antelope and mountain lions, where wildfires and snowstorms threaten in equal measure.
In Branch's hands, this exceedingly barren and stark landscape becomes a place teeming with energy, surprise, and an endless web of connections that ultimately includes his family and home. In this exhilarating, lyrical, and humorous exploration of natural history, Branch reveals a desert wilderness in which our ideas about nature and ourselves are challenged and transformed.
2017 Finalist - Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award
2017 Finalist - Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment Creative Book Award
2017 Finalist - Evans Biography and Handcart Award
Hardcover, 286 pages Published August 23rd 2016 by Roost Books
ISBN 1611803454 (ISBN13: 9781611803457)
JULY 18, 2019
How To Be a Good Creature – a Memoir in Thirteen Animals by Sy Montgomery
National Book Award finalist Sy Montgomery reflects on the personalities and quirks of 13 animals—her friends—who have profoundly affected her in this stunning, poetic, and life-affirming memoir featuring illustrations by Rebecca Green. Understanding someone who belongs to another species can be transformative. No one knows this better than author, naturalist, and adventurer Sy Montgomery. To research her books, Sy has traveled the world and encountered some of the planet’s rarest and most beautiful animals. It also explores vast themes: the otherness and sameness of people and animals; the various ways we learn to love and become empathetic; how we find our passion; how we create our families; coping with loss and despair; gratitude; forgiveness; and most of all, how to be a good creature in the world.
AUGUST 15, 2019
The Cattle Empire – The Fabulous Story of the 3,000,000 Acre XIT Ranch by Lewis Nordyke
Biography True story. This is the first authoritative account of the biggest ranch in the history of the US. Stretching for nearly 200 miles from north to south, the XIT lay in nine Texas counties. But its affairs reached out to Chicago, London, and the halls of Congress. The story began in 1875 Hardcover: 273 pages Publisher: William Morrow; First Edition edition (1949) ASIN: B001IQIWOGPublisher: William Morrow & Company; Second Printing edition (1949
SEPTEMBER 19, 2019
The River by Peter Heller
From the best-selling author of The Dog Stars, the story of two college students on a wilderness canoe trip--a gripping tale of a friendship tested by fire, white water, and violence. When they decide to canoe the Maskwa River in northern Canada, they anticipate long days of leisurely paddling and picking blueberries, and nights of stargazing and reading paperback Westerns. But a wildfire making its way across the forest adds unexpected urgency to the journey. When they hear a man and woman arguing on the fog-shrouded riverbank and decide to warn them about the fire, their search for the pair turns up nothing and no one. But: The next day a man appears on the river, paddling alone. Is this the man they heard? And, if he is, where is the woman? From this charged beginning, master storyteller Peter Heller unspools a headlong, heart-pounding story of desperate wilderness survival.Hardcover: 272 pagesPublisher: Knopf (March 5, 2019) ISBN-10: 0525521879 ISBN-13: 978-0525521877
OCTOBER 17, 2019
The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century by Kirk Wallace Johnson
A rollicking true-crime adventure and a thought-provoking exploration of the human drive to possess natural beauty for readers of The Stranger in the Woods, The Lost City of Z, and The Orchid Thief.
On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London’s Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin’s obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins–some collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwin’s, Alfred Russel Wallace, who’d risked everything to gather them–and escaped into the darkness.
Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide told him about the heist. He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief. In his search for answers, Johnson was catapulted into a years-long, worldwide investigation. The Feather Thief is also a fascinating exploration of obsession, and man’s destructive instinct to harvest the beauty of nature.
Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: Viking (April 24, 2018)
ISBN-10: 110198161 XISBN-13: 978-1101981610
Kindle Edition, 320 pages Published April 24th 2018 by Viking
ASIN B074DGMF88
