Subjects include snow crystals and snow ecology, birds' nests and winter bird behavior, evidence of insects, animals tracks and signs, winter weeds and wildflowers, evergreen plants, and wintering trees.
This is a wonderful book for everyone interested in bluebirds. It has lots of photographs and covers virtually every aspect of bluebird-ing, from housing to feeding to fledging to behavior.
"The companion to the Oscar-nominated film, Winged Migration is the definitive visual account of its subject: the extraordinary flights of migrating birds around the world. Migration is an enigma. Who knows why the cuckoo, born in Europe, flies alone to the far forests of Africa, home of its ancestors? Or how the Arctic tern can fly over ten thousand miles on its astonishing journey from pole to pole? Winged Migration follows single birds and whole squadrons on their restless flights seeking answers to such riddles. The result is a tour de force that is testament to the patience of a globe-trotting team of filmmakers and ornithologists. With its informative text, Winged Migration offers both the general reader and the dedicated bird watcher a bird's-eye view of five continents and a grand, yet intimate, portrait of the secret life of birds."
"Marie Winn is our guide into a secret world, a true wilderness in the heart of a city. The scene is New York's Central Park, but the rich natural history that emerges here--the loons, raccoons, woodpeckers, owls, and hundreds of visiting songbirds--will appeal to wildlife lovers everywhere. At its heart is the saga of the Fifth Avenue hawks, which begins as a love story and develops into a full-fledged mystery. At the outset of our journey we meet the Regulars, a small band of nature lovers who devote themselves to the park and its wildlife.
"As they watch Pale Male, a remarkable young red-tailed hawk, woo and win his first mate, they are soon transformed into addicted hawk-watchers. From a bench at the park's model-boat pond they observe the hawks building a nest in an astonishing spot--a high ledge of a Fifth Avenue building three floors above Mary Tyler Moore's apartment and across the street from Woody Allen's. The drama of the Fifth Avenue hawks--hunting, courting, mating, and striving against great odds to raise a family in their unprecedented nest site--is alternately hilarious and heartbreaking."
For anyone curious about the lives of migratory birds this book is a great nest of information. The author has traveled all over the world banding and observing birds and talking to the experts--amateur birders and ornithologists who have made many of the important discoveries about bird biology. From Alaska to Lake Erie to the limestone forests of Jamaica, Weidensaul reaches not only for the scientific particulars but for the universal stories and humanizing, descriptive turns of phrase that keep this book from bogging down in statistics and jargon. By book's end the reader is unable to resist the heart of this compelling story, a plea for the conservation of habitat to keep these miraculous creatures on--or at least circling--the earth.
Turkeys are not stupid. The author spent a year studying a flock of wild turkeys in the loblolly pine woods of Florida, having hatched wild turkey eggs and imprinting the poults on himself. Turkeys are masters of disguise, blending in with their surroundings in ways so subtle as to make the work of hunters and predators difficult. Hutto is a wildlife artist, and the book is illustrated with his sketches and color photographs.
"... this heartwarming story tells of William Lishman, a reclusive sculptor, who adopted a gaggle of geese, flew with them in an ultralight glider, and actually taught them to migrate--earning himself the nickname 'Father Goose.'"
Later, his book was made into the movie Fly Away Home, starring Jeff Daniels and Anna Paquin.
