An Alfred Russel Wallace Companion, edited by Charles H. Smith, James T. Costa, and David Collard

A survey of his career in and beyond biology

Alfred Russel Wallace is known as the other British naturalist who formulated the theory of evolution. While Darwin was taking his time writing On the Origin of Species, Wallace wrote a paper that also spelled out the process of natural selection. Through a gentleman’s agreement, Wallace stepped aside and let Darwin finish his book. That’s a highly abbreviated summary of what happened; the truth, of course, is more complicated. Nevertheless, Darwin’s name will forever be associated with evolution while many an average Joe these days has never even heard of Wallace. Wallace was nevertheless a very accomplished and respected biologist in his own right. He explored the Amazon basin and the Malay Archipelago, outlived Darwin by 31 years, and enjoyed a reputation as a “grand old man” of science. The book An Alfred Russel Wallace Companion, published in 2019, is an edited collection of essays by nine academics who examine various aspects of Wallace’s career. They give much-deserved consideration to his numerous accomplishments in the biological sciences while also shedding light on his endeavors further afield.

This is not an introduction to Wallace, but it is a synthesis. The reader is expected to have a basic knowledge of who Wallace was and his relation to Darwin and the theory of evolution through natural selection, but the book does not get into arcane matters that require a PhD to understand. The essays are written with scholarly rigor, citations, and notes. The reading degree of difficulty is about at an undergraduate level of proficiency. Although all the contributors are clearly very knowledgeable about Wallace’s life and career, they explain matters sufficiently for those who are not. As a survey of Wallace’s career, the book is successful in educating the reader about his significant accomplishments and influence. The scope of the essays sometimes overlap, however, which results in reading some of the same information multiple times.

If another goal of this book, as I suspect, is to get the reader to admire and esteem Wallace, it is less successful on that score. My regard for Wallace as a scientist actually lessened as I worked my way through this book. For starters, the book opens with a discussion of Wallace’s belief in spiritualism. The word “spiritualism,” in the late 19th century, meant a belief in ghosts, the “spirit world,” and communication with the dead. In other words, Wallace was attending séances and being fooled by spirit-conjuring mediums. Although Wallace was one of the chief formulators of evolutionary science, he also believed in intelligent design. When animals became humans, God intervened and somehow turned on their minds and souls. The book closes with a discussion of Wallace’s writings on extraterrestrial life. He thought humans on Earth must be the only intelligent life in the universe because God essentially created evolution for us: We are the purpose of the universe. It gets hard to take seriously a scientist who clings to such superstitious, supernatural, and teleological beliefs. The book also discusses disagreements between Wallace and Darwin over the details of natural selection, and in most cases, it seems Darwin was in the right. In the end, one doesn’t feel so bad that Darwin got most of the credit for evolution.

Wallace was also an outspoken public intellectual on socioeconomic matters. He advocated socialism and came up with a plan for land nationalization. If you’re reading this book because you’re interested in natural history, you won’t relish the chapter on British land law, tariffs, etc. The main positive verdict with which one comes away from this book is that Wallace was a pioneer in the field of biogeography: the study and mapping of the distribution ranges of species. In the days before genetics and continental drift, this was a key to determining where species arose, how they spread, and how they were related to other species. Although Alexander von Humboldt preceded him in the creation of this field, Wallace developed it to a higher level, carving out a specific domain of research in which he surpassed Darwin. There is no doubt that Wallace is an immensely important scientist in the pantheon of natural history, but the spiritualism and anthropocentric teleology are definitely a disappointment. If you’re only going to read one book on Wallace, this volume does provide a fine overview of his thought, for better or for worse.

Finding Order in Nature: The Naturalist Tradition from Linnaeus to E. O. Wilson by Paul Lawrence Farber

A brief primer on the history of natural history

Paul Lawrence Farber (1944–2021) was a professor of the history of science at Oregon State University. His specific area of interest was biology and natural history. His book Finding Order in Nature was first published in 1994. It relates how, over the course of about 250 years, the science of natural history progressed from the earliest efforts at species classification to the development of unified theories of life and the discovery of universal laws of nature.

Farber begins in the mid-18th century with the work of Sweden’s Carl Linnaeus and France’s Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, both of whom brought the classification of species to a systematic level that formed the foundation of modern natural history as we know it today. Many of the subsequent chapters revolve around conflicts of opposing views in the biological sciences: religious vs. secular views, form-ists (e.g. Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire) vs. function-ists (e.g. Georges Cuvier), experimental physiologists vs. collector/taxonomists, morphology vs. genetics. Of course, there’s a chapter on Charles Darwin, as well as those who championed his theory of evolution (e.g. Ernst Haeckel, Thomas Henry Huxley) and those who opposed it (e.g. Louis Agassiz, Richard Owen). As the subtitle indicates, the book ends with the recent work of E. O. Wilson, who pretty much gets a chapter all to himself.

This book is in Johns Hopkins University Press’s series Introductory Studies in the History of Science. The volumes in this series are deliberately intended to be brief overviews of their particular domains of science. Judging by Farber’s book alone, the only one I’ve read, these books are indeed introductory and written for students or other nonscientists. Finding Order in Nature runs about 200 pages. There are only about two or three footnotes per chapter and a bibliographic essay at the end. To me, this book reads as if it were meant to be a textbook for undergraduate students. The reading level is accessible enough, however, that it could even be used as a text for a high school course, if a course on such a subject existed.

I myself am not a scientist, but I read quite a few history books and biographies of naturalists. I like to live vicariously through their travels, researches, and discoveries. I was hoping that by reading this book I might discover some naturalists I’d never heard of and perhaps a few books I might want to pursue reading. The contents of Finding Order in Nature, however, were already largely familiar to me. In each of the book’s nine chapters, Farber covers two or three major players in natural history, and for the most part they are very well-known individuals. The most I got out of this was a few interesting biographical details on some of the scientists featured. I found a few titles of interest in the bibliographic essay, but the list of books is almost entirely comprised of secondary texts from the past fifty years rather than accounts written by the naturalists themselves.

That’s not to say that the book was a disappointment. I kind of knew what I was getting into when I bought it (as a Kindle Daily Deal). Farber accomplishes exactly what he set out to do. If I had read this book in my college days, it would have sparked my interest in natural history and given me a basic foundation for building further knowledge. At my present state of life and education, it was a brief and satisfying recap of a subject that I enjoy.

The Naturalist on the River Amazons by Henry Walter Bates

An exemplary narrative for armchair explorers

Henry Walter Bates (1825–1892) was an English naturalist. His area of expertise was entomology, the science of insects, but in the 19th century scientists were allowed to be generalists, so he made discoveries in other areas of biology as well. In 1842, Bates embarked on an expedition to explore the Amazon rainforest and gather specimens of the animals and plants that live there. Upon completing an expedition, 19th century naturalist-explorers would compile volumes of scientific texts describing the species they brought back with them. In addition, many would publish a narrative account of their travels intended for a general audience of non-scientists. In Bates’s case, the popular memoir he wrote of his South American journey is The Naturalist on the River Amazons, published in 1863.

This Amazon expedition started out as a joint undertaking with fellow British naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace, who is now better-known than Bates for having formulated the theory of evolution about the same time as Charles Darwin. Once in Brazil, Wallace and Bates seem to have often split up and conducted their own research, and Wallace returned to England several years before Bates. It’s hard to tell how much time the two spent together. Bates only mentions “Mr. Wallace” a few times in this memoir. That’s not unusual for scientific memoirs of this period, however. There seems to have been a gentleman’s agreement that each explorer would talk about himself and leave his traveling companions to write their own books. Wallace published his account, A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro, in 1889.

Bates’s mode of operation was to travel up the Amazon to a certain city, acquire a house on the outskirts of town, and live there for a few years. From these home bases, he would make hiking or boat trips deeper into the wilderness to explore and gather specimens. In this memoir, Bates’s explorations center around three main locations: Pará, near the Amazon delta (today there is a state named Pará, but the city is named Belém); Santarém, several hundred miles further up the river; and Ega (now called Tefé), a small village on the upper Amazon near the Peruvian border. The Amazon region was already somewhat “civilized” by this time. Bates interacted mostly with Whites (Portuguese) and Mamelucos (people of mixed Portuguese and Indigenous heritage, the Brazilian equivalent of Mexico’s Mestizos), but he did encounter some Native tribes living a relatively untouched existence, as well as Blacks of African descent, both slaves and free. Despite the extent of Portuguese colonization, very few European scientists had explored the Amazon by this time, so new, undescribed species were ripe for the picking. In the book’s introduction, Darwin states that Bates collected specimens of 14,712 species, about 14,000 of them being insects, and about 8000 of those species (not just insects) being previously “unknown to science.”

The problem with a lot of exploration narratives of this era is that despite attempts at accessibility for a popular audience, they end up being too academically scientific. Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), though still widely read and highly regarded, is a difficult read for the non-scientist, as is Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America (1814). Bates, however, really strikes the perfect balance between travel memoir and scientific text. He really armchair travelers a vivid impression of what the Amazon region was like in these frontier days, but if you’re interested in biology, there’s also plenty of good stuff in here about the bugs, birds, monkeys, reptiles, and plants of Brazil. You also learn a great deal about the people of Brazil—communities of all different races and levels of economic and cultural development. While Bates was certainly not the anti-colonial liberal that Alexander von Humboldt was, he does not display a great deal of expected Victorian-era racism in this memoir. He does have a tendency, however, to judge people by their level of “civilization” and view those living further in the bush as dumb hicks, regardless of race. All in all, the strengths of Bates’s writing add up to an exemplary exploration narrative. For those who envy the lives of these pioneering naturalists—traveling to exotic lands, studying the natural environment, and discovering “new” species—Bates’s book is a dream come to life.

Birds and Man by W. H. Hudson

More concerned with words than birds

W. H. Hudson was born in Argentina to a family of English and Irish heritage. He grew up in South America, emigrated to England in his early thirties, and published his first book in his early forties. Despite his late start, however, Hudson became a prolific author and published about four dozen books, mostly nonfiction but also a few novels (Green Mansions being his best-known work). Hudson was a naturalist who studied the plants and animals, particularly birds, of his native Argentina and later did the same in England. His book Birds and Man, published in 1901, is a series of essays about birds. In this volume, he’s only writing about English birds, not those of South America.

Hudson may have literally wrote the book on Argentine Ornithology (1888), but the books that I’ve read by him make it hard for me to believe he was a scientist. He writings come across more like the work of an avid birder with literary aspirations. What surprised me about this book, and why I dislike it, is because I learned almost nothing about the birds discusses, other than Hudson’s “artistic” descriptions about what they look or sound like. Each chapter focuses on a particular species, family of birds, or bird-related subject, within which Hudson will rattle off a string of anecdotes. These usually take the form of “I once saw a bird do this . . . It made me feel this way . . . That reminds me of a poem . . .” This book is not about the birds, it’s about Hudson’s feelings, and him showing off how he can relate those feelings through flowery language. 

This is not the first time reading a Hudson book has left me somewhat irritated (see also Idle Days in Patagonia). He seems like the kind of writer who one day decided, “I’m going to be a writer, and I’m going to write x thousand words a day . . .” whether he has anything interesting to say or not. Here in Birds and Man he shows no interest in educating the reader about birds. Rather, Hudson is trying to earn his place among the great British essayists like Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin. One way to get there, he thinks, is to reference poets—Wordsworth, Tennyson, Cowper, etc.—any chance he gets. Despite his attempts to flaunt his erudition, Hudson is just not that good of a writer to belong in such company, and most of this book ends up being an utter bore. 

As a birder, Hudson also sports a very snobbish, know-it-all attitude towards those who aren’t his equals in bird knowledge. There is no sense of him welcoming amateur birders into the fold. Anyone who doesn’t fly into fits of ecstasy at hearing the song of the Wood Wren is a Philistine. Those with pet parrots are simpletons. Those who can’t name the species in their local woods are idiots. Hudson complains a lot in this book about taxidermy. He prefers living birds to stuffed ones. He thinks dead birds belong in specimen drawers where only ornithologists can view them. He hates museum displays of stuffed birds, from which the public might actually be able to learn about and appreciate birds, thus becoming less of the Philistines he despises so much.

One interesting matter he discusses is how English bird species have been driven to extinction or endangered status because so many collectors want to have glass cases full of pretty stuffed birds in their living rooms. There are also a couple mildly amusing stories about a pet owl and some pet parrots. Other than that, I found this book to be a complete waste of time. I’m a birder; I enjoy books about birds, but I did not enjoy this one.

Peterson Reference Guide to Bird Behavior by John Kricher

Basic overview with pretty pictures

Roger Tory Peterson (1908–1996) was an American artist and naturalist who was probably the most important figure in the development of birding as a hobby, pastime, and/or obsession. His line of Peterson Field Guides has grown beyond ornithology to over 50 volumes examining diverse aspects of nature and ecology (not all authored by Peterson). In 2015, the Peterson Institute started adding a series of Peterson Reference Guides to their line of books. The Peterson Reference Guide to Bird Behavior, written by John Kricher, was published in 2020.

I expected these Reference Guides to be for advanced birders who want to delve deeper than what’s found in the typical field guide, perhaps something along the lines of Kenn Kaufman’s Advanced Birding, also in the Peterson line. I found the Peterson Reference Guide to Bird Behavior, however, to be surprisingly basic. Most of the information imparted in this volume can likely be found in the introductory chapters of a good field guide—the opening pages that most people ignore because they just look at the bird pictures. The way Kricher delivers the information is also not ideal. The book is intentionally written for a beginning-birder, non-scientific audience, but that doesn’t stop the text from being at times confusing and often boring.

The first half of the book provides some valuable information on bird anatomy. Those lessons are not aided, however, by the absence of diagrams in this book. That is likely a conscious choice on the part of the publisher: If we put a lot of pretty photographs in the book, that will attract general readers, but if we include diagrams, that will scare general readers away. They’ll think the book is too intense for them, like a textbook. So everything is written out by Kricher in prose paragraphs, even when that’s not the most appropriate way to deliver the information. The chapter on different stages of molting, for instance, is quite difficult to comprehend, when a simple table or chart would have made it so much easier to understand and remember. But if we put a table in the book, we’ll scare away those general readers! If you just want a general book on birds and the cool things they do, full of pretty pictures, then I would recommend David Attenborough’s The Life of Birds.

The most difficult aspect of writing or reading a book like this is that the general subject of birds, even just North American birds, encompasses an incredibly broad and diverse range of species and behaviors. The result of this is that most of the text reads like “Some birds do this. Some birds do that.” The only solution for that is to consult a book with specific behavioral information on every individual species, such as Kaufman’s Lives of North American Birds. That book is truly a reference guide, while Kricher’s is really more of a primer. Kricher tries to solve the problem of diversity by providing many examples. The trouble with this approach is that the book consists almost entirely of examples with very few principles or conclusions drawn. I also don’t like the fact that Kricher talks about himself so much in this book: I once saw this, or I once banded such-and-such a bird. I’m from the Northeast, so we’re mostly going to talk about Northeastern birds. I don’t really care what your personal perspective is. I want to learn about the birds, and not just the birds with which you have some kind of personal connection.

I have seen the Peterson Reference Guide for Sparrows and for Woodpeckers, and they seem to be more of what I expected from these Reference Guides. Those books appear to be deeper and more thorough in nature, simply because they’re not expected to cover every bird species imaginable. (and the publisher allowed some diagrams!) In general, the Peterson Field Guides are great; I’ve derived much joy and learning from them. This particular Reference Guide to Bird Behavior, however, is not one of the Institute’s better-thought-out offerings.

Cosmos, Volume I by Alexander von Humboldt

All of the things that go to make Heaven and Earth

If you’re old enough, you may remember the classic 1980s television series Cosmos, created and hosted by the astronomer Carl Sagan. Or, you might recall the 2014 series Cosmos, a tribute to Sagan’s work, hosted by Neil de Grasse Tyson. Both, however, stole the idea of Cosmos from Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). Just as Sagan and Tyson were likely the most famous scientists in America at the time their TV shows were broadcast, Humboldt was probably the most famous scientist in the world when he published his late-career magnum opus Cosmos. This landmark work of science literature was published in five volumes, the first of which, the subject of this review, came out in 1849. Humboldt’s Cosmos is an attempt to synthesize all knowledge of the natural sciences up to the mid-nineteenth century. It reads as if Humboldt wrote it for his scientific peers, but Cosmos also enjoyed an immense popular readership in its day.

Humboldt unfurls his scientific overview in a systematic fashion, beginning with the large and moving to the small. He starts by discussing “nebulae” that we now know to be other galaxies. He then examines the various components of our solar system before moving on to the Earth’s seismic and volcanic activities and its rocks and minerals. Then it’s on to oceanography and climatology before finally arriving at life in the form of plants, animals, and humans. Although Humboldt proceeds with systematic rigor, he was also notoriously prone to digressions on whatever topics interested him. The book gets off to a slow start with about a hundred pages of introductory material in which he outlines how scientists should write about nature, how he’s going to write about it, and what exactly he’s going to tell you, before he ever gets around to telling it. As an example of Humboldt’s wandering mind, even in this “general” introduction, there is a three-page footnote about the elevation of the snow line on various mountains of the world. When he finally gets to his “General Review of Natural Phenomena,” delivers it in typical nineteenth-century fashion: all in one long chapter with no breaks or subheads. Humboldt gives special extended attention to some of his “pet” interests, such as the zodiacal light (sunlight reflecting off cosmic dust). The English edition that I read from 1868 (translation by E. C. Otté) has only one appendix; it’s about prehistoric birds in New Zealand.

It’s really interesting to learn about the state of science in 1849, and how scientists and explorers of that era went about obtaining knowledge of our universe. This was before the discovery of continental drift or Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, but such revelations are certainly foreshadowed in this work. I’ve always admired Humboldt as an explorer and a naturalist, but when reading Cosmos one can’t help but admire him as a researcher. He seems to have read everything that had been published in four or five languages, no small feat when you consider how difficult it must have been just to get one’s hands on a specific book in those days, or how much time, effort, and patience was required for correspondence with one’s scientific colleagues.

Though he had an encyclopedic mind and a voracious appetite for specifics, as evidenced by some of the trivial rabbit holes he ventures down in this book, Humboldt was science’s master generalist. He was well-versed in a multitude of scientific disciplines, and his writings emphasize how all natural phenomena are intricately connected into a cohesive and interdependent whole. In this regard, Humboldt was the founder of ecology as we know it. In the introduction to Cosmos, he explains that he wants to write a work that assembles precise empirical data but never loses sight of the essential beauty and wonder of nature, the emotional effect so important to the Romantic movement. As far as imparting the beauty and sublimity of nature is concerned, Humboldt was more successful with his earlier work Views of Nature. Cosmos, on the other hand, reads more like a relentless torrent of data, but it’s a fascinating torrent to mentally bathe oneself in. Reading Cosmos is like living vicariously through a golden age of natural science, as if you were one of Humboldt’s associates. It’s a difficult read, not for everybody, but if you enjoy science history, a trek through Volume I of Cosmos is an inspiring and enlightening experience.  

All Things Reconsidered: My Birding Adventures by Roger Tory Peterson

A miscellany of magazine columns

Roger Tory Peterson (1908–1996) is not only the biggest name in birding but also a notable figure in book history. Others had published bird guides before Peterson, but he more or less created the modern genre of the popular illustrated field guide as we know it today. His Peterson Field Guides have since expanded into a broad range of natural history beyond just birds, and countless other authors, artists, and publishers have built and expanded upon his original template. All Things Reconsidered: My Birding Adventures was published in 2006. From the title, packaging, and table of contents, I had hoped I was getting a Peterson autobiography, or at least a birding memoir along the lines of Kenn Kaufman’s Kingbird Highway or Noah Strycker’s Birding Without Borders. That was not the case, however. “All Things Reconsidered” is the title of a column that Peterson wrote for Bird Watcher’s Digest magazine. This book is a collection of those articles. The 42 selections included here are arranged in chronological order by date of original publication, from 1984 to 1996.

While not an autobiography, most of the articles reproduced in this grab bag are to some extent autobiographical. The majority do in fact focus on birding adventures, with Peterson describing trips he took to find birds in various locations, from Connecticut to Botswana to Antarctica. These stories reach back as far as the 1920s. Peterson is famous as a painter of birds, but he was also a bird photographer, and many of these articles are as much about photography as about birding. There’s very little in here about art, except for a couple of good entries at the end of the book. In addition to bird finding and bird identification, these articles cover a number of other bird-related topics, including wildlife conservation, ecotourism, extinct species, and birding history. Peterson devotes a couple columns to the life of John James Audubon, and spends several entries eulogizing or paying tribute to his contemporary birding colleagues and friends.

One learns a bit about birds from this book but learns even more about birding tourism—sites to visit, how to get there, what species you’ll find, etc. Because Peterson is the rock star of birding, his ornithological outings are far from typical. Peterson was successful enough in his career to afford a globe-hopping lifestyle. He gets “backstage” access to wildlife refuges and national parks, with permission to venture into areas in which the general public is not allowed. Wherever he goes birding, he is guided by the manager or director of the refuge he’s visiting or the leading ornithologists in the area, who give him the inside tips on where to find the rare, endemic species. Peterson also gets ferried around to remote locations by a host of friends with yachts, planes, safari caravans, and research vessels. The average birder’s experience at these sites is unlikely to resemble Peterson’s, but it is entertaining to live vicariously through his experiences. I really admire that Peterson, having realized at a young age that he loved birds, decided to build a life around them, successfully forged a unique career path, and despite not really being an academic ornithologist, he nonetheless made a lasting impact on ornithology.

All Things Reconsidered is what it is: a collection of short, miscellaneous magazine articles, and that’s what it reads like. Peterson is a good writer who delivers clear prose and keeps things interesting. If you’re a birder, you certainly won’t be bored reading his bird-related memories. On the other hand, this book isn’t really about anything in particular, so you’re not going to learn a whole lot about anything in particular, including Peterson’s life and career. A book called Wild America (1955) would be Peterson’s equivalent to Kaufman’s Kingbird Highway, and I don’t believe he published an autobiography. He did leave us a lot of great books on birds, however, and for that we owe him a huge debt of gratitude.

Life in the Soil: A Guide for Naturalists and Gardeners by James B. Nardi

Inside the society of dirt

I fancy myself an amateur naturalist. I like to explore nature and see what I can see: birds, plants, mammals, fungi, butterflies, etc.—whatever I can identify. One aspect of the wild that I’ve never really known much about, however, is the soil. Seeing as how so much life springs forth from the soil, and it’s loaded with living organisms, I wanted to learn more about the ground and its inhabitants. I found what I was looking for with Life in the Soil, the 2007 book by James B. Nardi, a research scientist at the University of Illinois. Suitable for general readers (nonscientists), this book provides a detailed look at what goes on in the dirt beneath our feet.

What is soil made of? How is it formed? How long does it take rocks and plant matter to become soil? What living creatures are involved in this process? How do elements and minerals cycle in and out of the soil? What makes good soil vs. bad? Nardi answers all of these questions and more. The reader comes to a vivid understanding of the soil as a living, breathing, changing community of organisms and nutrients. On the one hand, this is a book that’s deep enough to detail complex chemical reactions and biological processes. On the other hand, it’s accessible enough to first provide elementary explanations of chemical notation and taxonomical hierarchy.

The bulk of this book is a field guide to all the creatures who live in, contribute to, or even just scratch the surface of the soil. The general arrangement is from smallest to largest, moving from microbes to invertebrates to vertebrates. This guide does not differentiate at the species level but rather at the family level. To include thousands of species would have been impossible, but this book will help you differentiate between true scorpions, pseudoscorpions, and microwhipscorpions, or between dung beetles, soldier beetles, tiger beetles, and ptilodactylid beetles, as well as different families of worms, flies, amphibians, rodents, and so on. There is no specific geographic range to this guide. In general, Nardi addresses an audience of American and British readers, but at times he might mention the land leeches of Guatemala, the shield-tailed snakes of India, or a stink badger from Indonesia. Within each family, Nardi discusses life cycles, feeding habits, and most importantly, the effect the organisms have on the soil. This guide is heavily illustrated with black and white drawings. The text makes reference to 69 color plates, but they are nowhere to be found in the ebook edition.

After the field guide portion of the book, Nardi outlines strategies for the creation and preservation of healthy soil, but at the same time he makes it sound like soil degradation is beyond the point of no return, and world famine is imminent. He encourages readers to start their own compost piles, but then he makes that process sound as difficult as possible, as if you need a PhD in biology and chemistry just to rot some vegetable matter. Finally, Nardi gives some tips for those who might like to collect and examine soil samples in order to view some of the creatures discussed in the book. The key audience for this book would be hobbyists in microscopy. Although the information in the book is scientifically comprehensive, the text is written in very simple vocabulary that even a junior high student can understand, so this would be a perfect gift for any kid or grown-up with a microscope. There is also some useful information here for gardeners, but again, without that microscope much of the book won’t apply to your average casual gardener.

Life in the Soil delivers a thorough entry-level education in soil science and biology that elevates the novice naturalist to an intermediate dirt-lover. I could have used those color plates, and at times the presentation of the information wavers between too elementary and not elementary enough. Overall, however, I learned a lot from this book and will likely refer to it on future hikes.

I Married Adventure by Osa Johnson

Kansas couple explores the world

Martin Johnson was a young man from Independence, Kansas, when Jack London hired him as a crew member on his yacht, the Snark, as detailed in Martin’s book Through the South Seas with Jack London (1913). London became ill and had to return to the U.S., but Johnson continued his journey and actually made it all the way around the world. After returning to Kansas, he married Osa Leighty from the equally small town of Chanute. Rather than settle down with his new bride, Martin was determined to continue his life of adventure. He invited Osa to share in his exotic exploits, and she was game for the challenge. The couple traveled the world and achieved fame for their wildlife photography, documentary filmmaking, and travel books. After Martin’s death, Osa published her autobiography I Married Adventure. It was the bestselling nonfiction book of 1940.

I Married Adventure recounts the couple’s youth and courtship in Kansas and details their subsequent adventures in the Solomon Islands, Borneo, and four trips to Africa, where they lived for a few years. Martin, the photography expert, bought the camera equipment and developed all the film. Osa was not just a passive passenger, however. She served as Martin’s right-hand woman. In addition to appearing on camera, Osa shot photos and film, shot dinner when necessary, drove a truck, managed staff, and entertained visiting dignitaries to camp like George Eastman of the Kodak company and the Duke and Duchess of York.

I admire Martin and Osa for their adventurous spirits, and I envy their travels. As a Kansan for most of my life, I also enjoyed the small-town-couple-make-it-big aspect of the story. The era in which the Johnsons traveled, however, wasn’t known for its ecological or ethnographical consciousness. The Johnsons hire 250 native porters to carry their supplies through hundreds of miles of wilderness, knowing full well that some of those porters are probably going to die along the way. If the porters aren’t moving fast enough, Martin whips them. When they reach their destination, they level swaths of forest to build a small, semi-permanent town, complete with decorative curtains and other frivolous amenities that some poor laborer had to schlep to the site. Osa brags about scattering invasive American flower seeds all over Africa. The couple have no qualms about shooting with guns the animals that they are shooting with cameras. Many anecdotes explain how the Johnsons would get as close as they could to the animals they were filming—lions, rhinos, water buffalo—until the animal would charge one spouse, and then the other would shoot the animal dead. Although the Johnsons occasionally traveled with zoologists from the American Museum of Natural History, Martin and Osa were photographers not scientists, not even amateur scientists. As a result, from this account by Osa you don’t really learn a whole lot about the animals or indigenous people that they encountered.

Although Osa clearly loved Martin, you don’t get much of a sense of his personality from this book, in which he comes across as something of a cipher. You almost get the impression that Osa really didn’t know him very well. That’s not a comment on their marriage, but rather a comment on her writing. This, however, was my grandparents’ generation, when people were more private and dignified when discussing their relationships. If spouses ever disagreed on anything, you wouldn’t hear it from Osa or my grandmother.

I don’t know about the rest of the world, but the Johnsons are still fondly remembered in their home state of Kansas. The Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum in Chanute is devoted to their lives, travels, and works. Reading this entertaining biography definitely makes we want to check it out.

A Naturalist at Large: The Best Essays of Bernd Heinrich

Assorted investigations in natural science

Biologist Bernd Heinrich was born in Germany and emigrated to Maine with his family as a young boy. He is now a professor emeritus at the University of Vermont, but he lives in Maine and has a cabin there where he seems to spend a lot of time. Heinrich first came to my attention for his investigations into the intelligence of ravens, but he is primarily an entomologist who has done extensive research on bees. Heinrich’s father Gerd Heinrich was also an esteemed entomologist.

A Naturalist at Large: The Best Essays of Bernd Heinrich was published in 2018. It is a collection of articles that Heinrich wrote for various periodicals. Almost all of the selections come from the magazine Natural History, where he appears to have had a regular column. Other than that, there are two articles each from Audubon, Outside, and the New York Times, and one from Orion. The majority of these essays are about observations and studies of nature that Heinrich made on his land in Maine. The rest take place in locations around the world where he has conducted research, such as the Canadian Arctic, the Judaean Desert in Israel, and the Okavango Delta in Botswana. In a typical chapter, Heinrich observes a pattern of animal behavior and comes up with an idea of how and why such a behavior would evolve. He then conducts further observations or experiments to test the validity of his hypothesis. Some examples of his inquiries include how bumblebees regulate their body heat, why water beetles gather in clumps, how the structure of tree branches determines their ability to survive ice storms, how tiny Golden-crowned Kinglets survive icy Maine winters, why there is a predominance of red flowers in the Middle East, and why all plant growth seems to twist in a counterclockwise direction.

Despite the title, I find it hard to believe that these are the best essays of Bernd Heinrich. If they titled the book Assorted Odds and Ends by Bernd Heinrich, however, it probably wouldn’t sell very well. This is basically a collection of magazine articles from mainstream periodicals (not scholarly journals), most of which are not feature articles but rather the sort of short articles and columns you find in the front of most science magazines before you get to the meatier fare.

I have a lot of respect for Heinrich’s work as a naturalist, but I was a bit bored by these writings. He makes the science seem moderately interesting but far from fascinating. Heinrich presents a very nuts-and-bolts approach to natural science: I noticed this. I formed a hypothesis. I tested it thusly. I came to these conclusions. Don’t expect the philosophizing of Thoreau in these Maine Woods. I was anticipating something more along the lines of A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold, another naturalist who wrote about the wilderness surrounding his cabin (in Wisconsin rather than Maine), but even Leopold’s essays on wildlife conservation policy read more poetically than Heinrich’s articles. What’s missing is any sense of what it feels like to be present in the wild places that Heinrich is describing. These essays read more like they were written in a laboratory. My guess is that Heinrich’s long-form books are more satisfying than these short essays. His workmanlike prose could benefit from some more room to breathe. I’d like to give his A Year in the Maine Woods a try, to see if there might be a little more Thoreau in him after all.

The Naturalist’s Illustrated Guide to the Sierra Foothills and Central Valley by Derek Madden

A model nature guide with beautiful art

I’ve never been to the Sierra Foothills nor the Central Valley of California, and there’s a good chance I may never go there. Like many people who enjoy the outdoors, however, I fancy myself an amateur naturalist, and I enjoy reading books about nature. The Naturalist’s Illustrated Guide to the Sierra Foothills and Central Valley was published in 2005, first under the title of Magpies and Mayflies, and then reissued under its present title in 2020. I bought this book for two reasons, 1) because it was a Kindle Daily Deal, so why not? and 2) I just love the illustrations. The art is by Derek Madden, a professor of biology at Modesto Junior College. Madden is also the primary author of the book, with help from Ken Charters and Erinn Madden. Although the art is in black and white, Madden’s depictions of plants and animals go way beyond the diagrammatic line drawings you typically see in such nature guides. These are really some gallery-worthy drawings. As a nature-inspired artist myself, I like having Madden’s work as a stylistic reference for how natural illustration should be done.

Enough about the pictures; how about the text? The book is divided into categorical chapters, starting with plants and fungi, then covering animals under the headings of invertebrates, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. This is not so much a field guide that one would use for identifying species in the wild. Although it could serve that purpose to some extent, if that’s your main concern then you’d be better off getting a guide with color photographs. Madden doesn’t cover every species in this geographical area, and in some cases, such as insects, he only discusses wildlife at the family level, not the species level. What Madden tries doing with this book, however, and he succeeds quite admirably, is to explain the life cycles and behaviors of these living things and how they fit together within the Sierra Foothills and Central Valley ecosystem. Although I don’t live in California, many of these same species, or at least their families, reside in Kansas, where I live, so much of the information in this guide is relevant to me and other nature lovers who live elsewhere in North America. 

One criticism of the book, and it’s a small one, is that Madden, being a biologist, only covers living things. I’ve always thought of the term “naturalist” as being someone who studies nature in its totality, including nonbiological natural processes such as geology, hydrology, and meteorology. Naturalists like Darwin, Humboldt, and Thoreau certainly broadened the scope of their writings to include such topics. Definitions of natural history vary, however, some including geology and habitat studies, some not, so maybe my quibbling is unreasonable.

Overall, I enjoyed this book and learned quite a bit from it. It’s really a model of how such regional natural histories (not full-color field guides) should be done, and the stunning art by Madden is a bonus. I wish I had an all-encompassing one-volume guide like this for the area in which I live. If you reside in California or frequently visit the region in question, all the better for you.

Fatu-Hiva: Back to Nature by Thor Heyerdahl

Polynesian Walden

Norwegian explorer and author Thor Heyerdahl achieved fame in the late 1940s and early 1950s with his book and documentary film Kon-Tiki, about his voyage from South America to Polynesia on a primitive wooden raft. The Kon-Tiki expedition was not his first adventurous journey, however. As early as his teenage years, Heyerdahl had dreamed of escaping civilization to live a self-sufficient life in an unspoiled wilderness. He decided on Fatu-Hiva, an island in the Marquesas, as the ideal destination in which to live this dream of getting “back to nature.” Heyerdahl deliberately searched for a wife to share this vision, and he found one in Liv Coucheron-Torp. The day after their marriage in 1936, the couple sailed for the Marquesas, where they would be dropped on the shore with little more than the clothes on their backs. In 1938, Heyerdahl published in Norway an account of this unconventional honeymoon entitled Hunt for Paradise. After achieving worldwide fame from his later expeditions, he revised the account and published it in English in 1974 as Fatu-Hiva: Back to Nature.

At the time, Fatu-Hiva was home to a few small coastal Indigenous communities and a handful of white men. The Heyerdahls ventured into the interior of the island to live a semi-isolated existence in the jungle. They relocated a few times to different locations around the island, where they built their own homes and mostly foraged for fruit and shellfish. Heyerdahl doesn’t just describe what they saw and did but also, much like Henry David Thoreau in Walden or Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, philosophizes quite a bit about nature and man’s place in it. This includes much eloquent lamenting on environmental degradation. In this travelog, Heyerdahl’s account goes beyond the romantic stereotype of a South Pacific paradise and presents the realistic pros and cons of living on a tropical island.

It was here in the Marquesas that Heyerdahl first got the idea that Polynesians are descended from seafaring Peruvians, an theory he tested with his Kon-Tiki expedition. On Fatu-Hiva, the Heyerdahls encountered many Polynesian ruins and anthropological artifacts. Heyerdahl points out the stylistic similarities between the art of the Polynesians and Indigenous South Americans. He also discusses in much detail the migration or transplantation of plant and animal species between the Americas and Polynesia. He hypothesizes on which species were brought to Fatu-Hiva by white explorers and which preceded them (thus brought by ancient South American mariners). This theory of the American ancestry of Polynesians was controversial for its time, since most scientists believed that Polynesians were descended from mainland Asians who migrated Eastward. Today, Heyerdahl’s theory is considered racially problematic pseudoscience, and DNA evidence doesn’t support it. Nevertheless, when it comes to expedition narratives, Heyerdahl knows how to write a good book. For those who like exotic adventure, Kon-Tiki is an excellent read; Fatu-Hiva is merely good. For a better account of roughing it in the Marquesas, read Herman Melville’s Typee.

Given Heyerdahl’s background in zoology, I was disappointed that he didn’t write more about the wildlife of Fatu-Hiva. He focuses more attention on the human inhabitants of the island. Despite being far off the beaten path, Fatu-Hiva was not entirely uncivilized nor untouched by European influence. In fact, the greatest danger faced by the Heyerdahls is unexpected: Catholic islanders who persecute the couple for being Protestants. Heyerdahl readily admits that his experiment in getting “back to nature” was only partially successful because the negative aspects of human nature and modern civilization were to some degree inescapable. Nevertheless, his attempt at a tropical idyll is admirable and makes for an interesting read.

Curators: Behind the Scenes of Natural History Museums by Lance Grande

Professional memoir, career guide, and museum lore

If I could go back in time and start another career, I think I’d like to be a naturalist of some sort, someone who explores the wildernesses of the world, studying plants and animals and discovering new species, like a modern-day Audubon, Darwin, or Humboldt. Nowadays, many of the people who conduct this kind of research work as curators for natural history museums. Lance Grande has occupied one such enviable position for roughly four decades at the Field Museum in Chicago. In his 2017 book Curators: Behind the Scenes of Natural History Museums, Grande recounts his distinguished career in natural history and provides an enlightening look at the profession of scientific curation.

Grande has degrees in geology, zoology, and evolutionary biology. Before being hired by the Field Museum, he completed his PhD while working and studying at the American Natural History Museum in New York. Grande’s specialty is vertebrate paleontology, particularly fossil fishes, but, as he explains in Curators, his work at the Field Museum has also led him to research in other related fields. Grande discusses his field work hunting fossils in Wyoming and Mexico, his involvement with the acquisition, preparation, and display of the Field Museum’s famous Tyrannosaurus Rex fossil named SUE, and his redesign of the Grainger Hall of Gems exhibit. Grande also held a management position as head of Collections and Research for the Field Museum, so he discusses the administrative issues he faced while overseeing that department.

For the first several chapters, one wonders why the book wasn’t called Curator, singular, since it’s basically a memoir of Grande’s career. In the second half of the book, however, he discusses the work of his fellow curators at the Field Museum, the general workings of the museum and the various research initiatives they’ve launched, and broader issues in the museum field such as wildlife conservation and the repatriation of human remains. Grande also spends a few chapters looking back at great Field Museum curators of the past, such as herpetologist K. P. Schmidt, anthropologist Franz Boas, and geologist Bryan Patterson, whose father hunted the legendary man-eating lions of Tzavo (now immortalized through taxidermy at the Field Museum). These stories of past generations add further depth to Grande’s survey of the curatorial profession.

This would be an excellent book for a high school or college student interested in the natural sciences. It might very well provide the inspiration for students to explore careers in natural history, museum work, or wildlife conservation. For an older reader like me, it was just a fascinating behind-the-scenes fantasy-camp look into natural history museums—institutions that I enjoy visiting. The text is accessible to students and general readers, but not oversimplified. Scientific and administrative matters are discussed at an intelligent adult level, about on a par with National Geographic or Science News magazines. Professors and museum professionals aren’t likely to gain any scientific revelations from this book, but they might enjoy reading it for an overview of what’s been going on at the Field Museum. The book is also very well illustrated, with a color photograph of just about everything, everyone, and everywhere that Grande discusses in the book.

Scientific biographies and autobiographies are a genre that I typically enjoy, as I like to live vicariously through scientists’ explorations and discoveries. Curators not only succeeds as a scientific memoir but also has the added benefit of functioning as an illuminating glimpse into museum careers. Grande’s obvious enthusiasm and aptitude for addressing general readers results in an engaging and informative book that anyone with an interest in natural history will enjoy.

Idle Days in Patagonia by William Henry Hudson

Too many idle thoughts, not enough Patagonia

William Henry Hudson (1841-1922) was born in Argentina, the son of settlers from the United States. He was raised in the pampas near Buenos Aires. He became a British citizen in 1900, and over the course of a literary career that spanned roughly four decades, he published many books on Argentina and England, including ornithological treatises, travelogues, memoirs, and novels. His book Idle Days in Patagonia, published in 1893, is about his first trip South into the vicinity of Argentina’s Rio Negro.

In the opening chapter, Hudson tells us that this journey to Patagonia is a lifelong dream of his. He has always wanted to study the birds of that region. On his way down the Atlantic Coast from Buenos Aires, the steamer in which Hudson is traveling is inadvertently grounded on a beach. All of the passengers have to get out and walk to their destination, a journey of a couple days. Shortly after reaching the Rio Negro, an English acquaintance of Hudson’s accidentally shoots him in the foot. This injury puts a limit on his birding and botanizing expeditions, and, as Hudson explains, results in the “idle days” of the title. Nevertheless, Hudson does manage to venture out a bit on horseback and observe the scenery, wildlife, and vegetation of the region, his descriptions of which constitute much of the book..

Although Hudson is an ornithologist, this book is not a scientific text. He mentions many bird species by name and gives a sentence or two about how pretty they are, but there is very little to learn here about the anatomy or behavior of South America’s birds. This is more a work of travel literature, and not a very good one at that. Successful travel literature requires that the author give the reader a sense of place in regards to the location that’s being discussed, and Hudson doesn’t really accomplish that. In fact, he doesn’t even seem to care whether he writes about Patagonia or not. He drew several of the chapters from papers and articles he had previously published in periodicals. There is an entire chapter in which he rambles on about snow, whiteness, and Herman Melville that has nothing to do with Patagonia at all. Two chapters on eyes and eyesight only vaguely touch upon the people and birds of South America. A chapter on the sense of smell is even more irrelevant. There is even a brief passage in which Hudson advocates for nudism. Hudson frequently departs from his Patagonian narrative to go off on all sorts of asides, which might be forgivable if they approached the philosophical profundity of Henry David Thoreau’s digressions. Instead, Hudson’s musings are mostly just common sense and personal opinion.

Hudson strikes me as one of those authors who decided early in life, “I’m a writer, by God!” and then proceeded to crank out a relentless stream of books about anything that crossed his mind without any consideration of whether what he was saying would be interesting to others. Many writers, once they’d been shot in the foot, might have decided “OK, I guess I’m not going to write this book,” but not Hudson. As a birding enthusiast, I have a high tolerance for writers who just like to talk about birds. Idle Days in Patagonia, however, left me with the feeling that, if I went and spent some time in Argentina, even I could write a better book about it than this.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon and leave me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.

https://www.amazon.com/review/R281BGAQSURKB3/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm

Henry David Thoreau: A Life by Laura Dassow Walls

Not the “hermit” of Walden but a public intellectual

Laura Dassow Walls, a professor emerita of English at the University of Notre Dame, happens to have written books about a few fascinating figures whom I admire greatly. Luckily for me, Walls is a very good researcher and writer. I previously read her biography of Alexander von Humboldt, The Passage to Cosmos. She followed that excellent book with a biography of another interesting and important figure, Henry David Thoreau: A Life, published in 2017.

In Thoreau’s case, how do you write a biography about someone who devoted most of his life to autobiographical writings? Well, for starters, Walls doesn’t spend a lot of time at Walden Pond. She assumes the reader has already read Thoreau’s best-known work, so she doesn’t devote a lot of time summarizing it. Instead, she concentrates more on Thoreau’s family life, literary career, and the behind-the-scenes story of how Walden became a book. In regards to other Thoreau works, however, such as The Maine Woods and Cape Cod, Walls does quite a bit of recapping. Although Thoreau: A Life is largely a factual biography, it includes a fair amount of literary criticism, as well as considerable speculative psychoanalysis of the man in question.

For those who know little about Thoreau, there’s a popular misconception of him as a hermit who abandoned society to live as a recluse deep in the forest. For most anyone who would be interested in reading this biography, however, it’s likely common knowledge that Walden Pond was just outside of town, Thoreau’s house in the woods was not very far off the beaten path, and while he lived there he still had a great deal of social interaction with friends, family, and the citizens of Concord, Mass. Thoreau’s experiment at Walden was more about domestic economy, environmental awareness, and spiritual clarity than about self-imposed isolation. Walls also reveals that the relationship between Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson was more complicated than simply the kindred spirits of a mentor and mentee. She delves deeply into their friendship and shows that the two were as much rivals as friends. Beyond the expected cast of Transcendentalists, Walls also recounts Thoreau’s encounters with many important literary and historical figures of his day, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Horace Greeley, Frederick Douglass, and John Brown.

One surprise to me was the extent of Thoreau’s celebrity during his lifetime. At least in Massachusetts, and to some extent farther afield, he was well-known as a naturalist and as an author who was popular on the lecture circuit. When he published an essay on a current issue, both the intelligentsia and the general public paid attention and reacted. That’s not to say, however, that his books sold well. He struggled to make ends meet during his lifetime and made most of his living on carpentry and surveying. Instead of just Thoreau the guy who wanders in the woods, Walls’s biography really provides a good look at Thoreau the writer and man of letters who had to promote himself and deal with publishers and critics just like any other literary figure. We also get a glimpse at Thoreau the natural scientist, who counted Harvard faculty like Louis Agassiz among his colleagues. Walls has already published an entire book on Thoreau’s contributions to science entitled Seeing New Worlds, which I look forward to reading.

Thoreau may not have lived as exciting a life as Humboldt (who has?), but the two share much common ground. Both explored the intersection between literature and science, both were early pioneers of ecological thought, and both have been served well by Walls’s thorough research and thoughtful writing. In Thoreau: A Life, Walls skillfully combines factual data, intellectual history, and philosophical analysis into a well-crafted biography that does justice to this illustrious and complex individual.  

If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.

https://www.amazon.com/review/R4EO40E64TCTS/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm

Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth by Richard Fortey

An excellent paleontological overview of our planet’s past

Richard Fortey is a senior paleontologist at London’s Natural History Museum. In addition to his output of academic research, he has written several science books for a general reading audience, including Life, originally published in 1997. In this book, Fortey provides a four-billion-year biography of life on Earth, following the course of evolution from our planet’s first molecules of living matter to we humans today. Fortey has delivered an intentionally nonacademic book with very few footnotes and almost no bibliography, but the subject matter is not drastically dumbed-down for the lay reader. This impressive, engaging, and comprehensive work likely amounts to an undergraduate college course worth of natural history.

Although this book is aimed at a popular audience, Fortey doesn’t just jump right into the crowd-pleasing dinosaurs, mammoths, and cavemen. Much like history itself, the majority of the book is populated by microbes and invertebrates. Fortey, an expert on trilobites, has no problem giving the Precambrian and Paleozoic species their due for having ruled the Earth far longer than we have. His ability to make these earlier, slimier periods of our planet’s history compelling and engaging is quite remarkable. He has a knack for drawing scenes of long-past environments that make the reader feel immersed in a live-action diorama of biological activity. Fortey manages to make Ordovician molluscs every bit as exciting as a museum display of robotic dinosaurs.

I wouldn’t say there were many surprising revelations in this book. Don’t expect a definitive answer to the origin of life, for example. Fortey seems disposed towards the cosmic seeding theory, in which organic molecules were deposited on Earth by comets or meteors. That may very well be possible, but whenever I hear that theory it just seems like a cop out to me, a theoretical passing of the buck. Even if life did came from space, somewhere in the universe, at some time, there had to have been a primordial soup, yet we still can’t come up with a viable explanation of how physics and chemistry created biology.

The cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs, as explained here, is no surprise either. Fortey does, however, provide some very interesting background on how the meteor theory was formulated and the history of resistance against it. That’s pretty indicative of the book as a whole. Most of us already know much about the history of life on Earth from school or science magazines or educational TV programs. Fortey makes the subject more exciting by fleshing out the basics with fascinating details and intriguing examples. He also frequently delves into the history of paleontology as a discipline, highlighting key figures, their momentous discoveries, and the major debates in the field. In addition, Fortey includes anecdotes of his own paleontological field work. The result of all this is like sitting in the study of a distinguished professor as he regales you with his encyclopedic knowledge of nature and evolution in a casual, conversational manner. I not only learned a great deal about natural history from this book, I also gained a much better idea of what exactly paleontologists do and how they work.

I had previously read Richard Dawkins’s The Ancestor’s Tale, which is a book with a similar scope and purpose as this one. Dawkins covers the history of life on Earth by moving backward in time, while Fortey starts at the beginning and moves forward. Of the two, Fortey’s writing is far better. His prose is more engaging, his asides more relevant, and his overall delivery of information more educational. If I had to choose one book to refer to on matters pertaining to paleontology and natural history, Life would be it. It is really an impressive achievement.

If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.

https://www.amazon.com/review/R8OLZM5BHI6ZI/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm

Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl by Jonathan C. Slaght

Moderately interesting field-work memoir

In 2005, Jonathan Slaght was working on a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. To achieve his degree, he formulated a research project to study the Blakiston’s fish owl. This majestic bird, the largest owl species in the world, lives in the forests of Eastern Asia. Slaght decided to conduct his research in the Russian province of Primorye, along the Pacific coast northeast of Vladivostok. Though an American by birth, through his father’s occupation and some time in the Peace Corps Slaght had previously lived in Primorye, spoke the language, and was familiar with the region’s customs. Over the course of the next few years, Slaght made repeated trips to Primorye to find Blakiston’s fish owls, capture them, and fit them with radio telemetry devices to track their movements, with the end goal of crafting a conservation plan for the fish owl and completing his dissertation. Slaght’s 2020 book Owls of the Eastern Ice is a memoir of his time spent in Primorye conducting this research project.

Owls of the Eastern Ice is basically a 24-page National Geographic article that has been drawn out into a 300-page book. There isn’t enough of interest here to merit such a lengthy treatment. At least half of the book consists of Slaght and his team looking for owls and not finding any. The reader gleans a little bit of a feel for what life is like in this remote portion of Russia, but Slaght doesn’t delve much deeper into the culture than many episodes of drinking in hunting cabins. The most memorable passages of the book involve Slaght and his Russian colleagues escaping some natural threat or obstacle, such as a flood or blizzard.

Other than the fish owls that Slaght is searching for, he doesn’t offer much discussion of the rest of the ecosystem beyond a few mentions of other species spotted here and there. The reader never really gets the feeling of what it’s like to be among these forests. Although this is a book about nature, it’s not really nature writing. A naturalist like Bernd Heinrich might combine concrete bird science with broader Thoreau-like musings, but Slaght’s book is strictly focused on his research. For other zoologists engaged in projects involving the tagging and radio-tracking of animals, this might be a helpful case study in methods and techniques. As an average bird-lover, however, I was disappointed to find that I learned more about capturing fish owls than I did about the birds themselves. This is a perfectly sound volume on an ornithological research project, but I’m not sure why the publisher decided to give this book the full-on trade book treatment and market it to general readers.

I envy Slaght’s adventures: exploring remote wilderness in a foreign land, observing beautiful birds, uncovering previously unknown facts about them, and working to conserve wildlife. His writing, however, while exhibiting the perfectly competent and articulate voice of a scientist, didn’t really generate much excitement in the relating of his travels. This memoir isn’t colorful enough to succeed as a travelogue. The audience most likely to enjoy this book are Slaght’s fellow ornithologists, not for its scientific findings—which would be presented in his dissertation or other academic publication—but for its relatable anecdotes of field work.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.

https://www.amazon.com/review/RV6C06BICQJP3/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm