The Nature of Things

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment : One of my very favorite winter visitors - yes, I have many! - is the little Chipping Sparrow , seen here in a picture from last winter. They are said to be in the area already but I haven't seen any in my yard yet. *~*~*~* Part of the proposed wall on the border between the U.S. and Mexico has been built and, just as conservationists feared, it is having a devastating effect on the wildlife there . Habitats are being destroyed, migration routes blocked, and some species cut off from their sources of food and water. In an effort to get the wall built, environmental laws were waived. Just as in the effort to combat terrorism, laws protecting human rights were waived. It seems we are a people who only adhere to our principles when absolutely convenient. *~*~*~* Evolutionary geneticists have published a new study which confirms that a "big bang" occurred in avian evolution after the extinction of the dinosaurs....

The Paleo diet is the latest fad for those who obsess about food. It has swept the nation and become wildly popular, and, truthfully, as a diet fad, it has a lot to recommend it. It focuses on eating only fresh, whole, and healthy foods, prepared from scratch. What can one criticize about that? The diet, however, is likely based on a fiction. After all, the Paleo shopper wasn't able to head down to the local Whole Foods to select fresh foods. No, I suspect the Paleo diner ate pretty much whatever he or she could get his or her teeth into, whether or not it was fresh and whether or not it met strict dietary guidelines. So what's next for the discerning fad dieter? What could be even more extreme and restrictive than the Paleo diet? How about the Plio diet, eating like our ancestors of the Pliocene Epoch? What could be tastier or healthier than a rotting fruit full of worms? (Hat tip to Daily Kos)

The Truelove by Patrick O'Brian My rating: 3 of 5 stars Captain Jack Aubrey and Dr. Stephen Maturin are still in the South Seas in this 15th entry in Patrick O'Brian's series. It's a rather slow moving tale that doesn't seem to advance the Aubrey/Maturin saga that much - at least until near the end when Maturin gets a clue that may identify a highly placed English spy in the pay of Napoleon's intelligence service. It's a name he has been seeking for a while. The storyline this time is that Captain Aubrey and the Surprise have been dispatched by the Royal Navy to the Sandwich Islands where a British whaler has been captured by a local chief at the instigation and with the assistance of the French. Intelligence reveals that there are two warring chiefs on the island - the northern one who has allied himself with the French and the southern one who turns out to be a particularly handsome woman of about 35. Aubrey's mission is to offer his assistance to th...

Have you seen this? It's been making the rounds on YouTube for a while so you may have, but I can't resist sharing it anyway. It's become my favorite Christmas song of this season. 

Sun and Shadow: An Erik Winter Novel by Åke Edwardson My rating: 2 of 5 stars This is apparently the third book in Ake Edwardson's Erik Winter series, but it was the first one to be translated into English from the original Swedish and so was the first one I was able to read. This put me a bit at sea as a reader because there were frequent references throughout the book to events that had happened earlier and that were, I suppose, covered in the other books. I had to guess at their significance. Another problem that I had with the book was its formatting in Kindle. Edwardson switches back and forth with the voice in which the story is told, almost from paragraph to paragraph at times. We'll get a few paragraphs of things from Erik Winter's perspective. Then we may hear from his girlfriend, Angela, or from one of the policemen with whom he works. That's not a problem except that there is almost always no break to show the change in voice. So I'm reading along thinki...

Mark Strand was a Canadian-born American poet who was our poet laureate in 1990 and who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1999. He died last week at the age of 80. Strand was recognized as one of the premier American poets of his generation. In addition, he was an accomplished editor, translator, and writer of prose. His style was marked by a precise use of language, surreal imagery, and a recurring theme of absence and negation. His writing also utilized pointed, often urbane wit to convey his message. Here is an example of his poetry that seems especially appropriate for the season. Lines for Winter by Mark Strand Tell yourself as it gets cold and gray falls from the air that you will go on walking, hearing the same tune no matter where you find yourself— inside the dome of dark or under the cracking white of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow. Tonight as it gets cold tell yourself what you know which is nothing but the tune your bones play as you keep going. And you will be ...