The Nature of Things

And now for something completely different... Ogden Nash was one of those rare writers who was able to combine laugh-out-loud humor with poetry to good effect. His humor always had a point and usually had an essential truth well-camouflaged within it. He certainly hit the mark with this poem about birding. You Can't Get There from Here by Ogden Nash Bird watchers top my honors list. I aimed to be one, but I missed. Since I'm both myopic and astigmatic, My aim turned out to be erratic, And I, bespectacled and binocular, Exposed myself to comment jocular. We don't need too much birdlore, do we, To tell a flamingo from a towhee; Yet I cannot, and never will, Unless the silly birds stand still. And there's no enlightenment in a tour Of ornithological literature. Is yon strange creature a common chickadee, Or a migrant alouette from Picardy? You can rush to consult your Nature guide And inspect the gallery inside, But a bird in the open never looks Like its picture in the bi...

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment : Juvenile birds, like this young male Northern Cardinal , are all over the backyard these days. Often they look very similar to adults and it may be difficult to distinguish that they are juveniles, but the cardinals make it easy. The young ones have dark bills. Only when they mature will they develop the distinctive red beaks of their species. *~*~*~* Environmental groups have been attempting to convince the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to change the status of the Lesser Prairie Chicken from threatened to endangered so that it can receive more vigorous protection. Persuasion has not worked so now three environmental organizations have filed suit against the agency to try to force the change. *~*~*~* Pesticides that get into the environment can have unintended and detrimental consequences. This is the case in the use of rat poisons in urban settings . Raptors and other predators that feed on the rats can have the poison...

The Old Fox Deceiv'd by Martha Grimes My rating: 3 of 5 stars Twelfth Night in the tiny Yorkshire fishing village of Rackmoor. It is a typically chilly and very foggy night with a North Sea wind blowing. The perfect night for murder. A young woman in costume apparently on her way to a Twelfth Night party at the local manor house is brutally murdered, her body left on steps on the way to the party. She was stabbed with some sort of two-pronged instrument. The police can't find the murder weapon or very many clues to what actually happened. Days later, when the trail has already grown cold, New Scotland Yard is called in and Inspector Richard Jury, along with his sidekick Wiggins, is assigned to the case. He's soon joined by his unofficial sidekick, Melrose Plant, who just happens to be a guest in that aforementioned manor house. There are many questions about the victim of the murder. First of all, her identity. Was she really Dillys March, the long-lost much-loved ward of...

It isn't so often that I find myself disagreeing with Joan Walsh of Salon.com , but this is one of those times. Walsh wrote a column on Wednesday in which she agreed with all those politicians who are castigating the president because he did not plan to make a visit to the border while he is in Texas to see the thousands of immigrants detained there. Her argument was that such a visit would illustrate the complexity of the humanitarian and immigration crisis like nothing else. She's wrong. We don't need the president in a photo op with desperate children to illustrate the complexity of the problem. All that would do would be to provide a media circus for the 24-hour news cycle. It would not get any closer to solving the problem. The complexity of the problem is self-evident. It is a product of chaotic conditions in Central American countries, conditions in which the United States with its appetite for cocaine from the region is clearly complicit. And then, of course, there...

Leucophyllum frutescens in my backyard garden, July 8, 2014. Leucophyllum frutescens , aka "Texas sage," "ceniza," "barometer bush," "purple sage," "Texas ranger" and probably several other common names, is a medium-sized evergreen shrub of variable growth habit that is native to Texas and Mexico. When Zane Grey wrote Riders of the Purple Sage , this was the plant he was referring to. Texas sage is the name it is most often known by in my area. It is a tough, tough plant, extremely tolerant of our triple-digit summer weather with its long dry spells but also able to survive fairly cold temperatures for extended periods. The frequent unusually cold spells which we experienced last winter, with temperatures down to 20 degrees F. or below, did not faze my plant at all. One of the most interesting things about this plant is its bloom habit. The shrub produces abundant tubular flowers in response to high soil moisture or humidity. In summer...

The Man with a Load of Mischief by Martha Grimes My rating: 3 of 5 stars I've decided to give myself a treat with my summer reading by indulging mostly in my guilty pleasures - that is to say mysteries. And in so doing, I plan to delve into some of the series which I haven't sampled before, starting with Martha Grimes' Inspector Richard Jury series. This has been recommended to me at various times over the years, but, for some reason, I just never got into it. Maybe because I was busy reading several other series. But time to break new ground and meet some new characters. One would think that a book featuring a New Scotland Yard detective inspector as its main character would be a police procedural type, but this, I think, falls more in the "cozy" category. While Inspector Jury may be the main character, the story is set in a small village and there are various eccentric villagers who "assist the police in their inquiries," and we see much of the story ...

The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith My rating: 4 of 5 stars Readers of the Harry Potter series know very well what a master storyteller J.K. Rowling is. Even when she uses the pseudonym "Robert Galbraith" that talent shines through. She has written a second very entertaining entry in her Cormoran Strike detective series. The Silkworm holds the reader's interest from the first page to the last. It is quite simply delicious fun to read. Part of what makes it such fun is the setting of this novel. Rowling/Galbraith has taken on the publishing industry, something about which she undoubtedly knows a very great deal and on which she must have very well-formed opinions. Coming from one of the most successful writers in history, those opinions certainly carry an extra dollop of interest as one speculates about the personalities of her characters. The center of this story is novelist Owen Quine, who goes missing, not for the first time. His dowdy wife Leonora becomes alarmed when h...