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A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm
A book about a time gone by, about family, about growing up -- storytelling and descriptive nature writing at its best. The great naturalist, Edwin Way Teale, spent his boyhood holidays and summers at his grandparents' farm, Lone Oak, in Indiana. In Dune Boy, first published in 1943, he recounts these buccolic visits and his budding interest in the natural world around him. A loner, often bullied by other children, Teale escaped to the roof of the old house where he gazed at the golden dunes in the distance, and dreamed his own fantastic dreams. The young Teale was fascinated by moths, dragonflies, snakes, and the workings of the farm. He yearned to fly. He tried to hitch a calf to a cart, to ride a pig. He created a "museum" for his collections of arrowheads, stones, and fish skeletons. Most of all, he enjoyed his storytelling, hardworking grandfather, and his book-reading, equally hardworking grandmother. They reveled in and encouraged him. He returned to Lone Oak every summer until he was fifteen, when the old farm house caught fire and burned down..
Price: $9.96
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Downcanyon: A Naturalist Explores the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon
Every writer comes to the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon with a unique point of view. Ann Zwinger's is that of a naturalist, an "observer at the river's brim." Teamed with scientists and other volunteer naturalists, Zwinger was part of an ongoing study of change along the Colorado In all seasons and all weathers, in almost every kind of craft that goes down the waves, she returned to the Grand Canyon again and again to explore, look, and listen. From the thrill of running the rapids to the wonder in a grain of sand, her words take the reader down 280 miles of the "ever-flowing, energetic, whooping and hollering, galloping" river. Zwinger's book begins with a bald eagle count at Nankoweap Creek in January and ends with a subzero, snowy walk out of the canyon at winter solstice. Between are the delights of spring in side canyons, the benediction of rain on a summer beach, and the chill that comes off limestone walls in November. Her eye for detail catches the enchantment of small things played against the immensity of the river: the gatling-gun love song of tree frogs; the fragile beauty of an evening primrose; ravens "always in close attendance, like lugubrious, sharp-eyed, nineteenth-century undertakers"; and a golden eagle chasing a trout "with wings akimbo like a cleaning lady after a cockroach." As she travels downstream, Zwinger follows others in history who have risked—and occasionally lost—their lives on the Colorado. Hiking in narrow canyons, she finds cliff dwellings and broken pottery of prehistoric Indians. Rounding a bend or running a rapid, she remembers the triumphs and tragedies of early explorers and pioneers. She describes the changes that have come with putting a big dam on a big river and how the dam has affected the riverine flora and fauna as well as the rapids and their future. Science in the hands of a poet, this captivating book is for armchair travelers who may never see the grandiose Colorado and for those who have run it wisely and well. Like the author, readers will find themselves bewitched by the color and flow of the river, and enticed by what's around the next bend. With her, they will find its rhythms still in the mind, long after the splash and spray and pound are gone..
Price: $8.16
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Shaped by Wind and Water: Reflections of a Naturalist (The World As Home)
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Nature's Fading Chorus: Classic And Contemporary Writings On Amphibians
A look at the ways in which humankind's understanding of its place in nature has changed through the course of Western history. It features an anthology of writings on amphibians drawn from the entire Western natural history tradition, beginning with Aristotle's "Inquiry Concerning Animals", written in the fourth century BC, and continues through recent scientific accounts of the sudden and alarming global declines in amphibian species. The pieces presented here not only reveal much about amphibian life but also provide insight into the worldviews of the many writers, scientists and naturalists featured, including Pliny the Elder, Gilbert White, Henry David Thoreau, Charles Darwin, T.H. Huxley, Stephen Jay Gould, George Orwell and many others..
Price: $16.95
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