Books
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The consequence of reading poetry at 5 am
Sick with a head cold, and possibly more. And it kept me up last night. So I read from Billy Collins' collection "Water Water". And this poem came about. The house is silentSave for the aquarium’s flowAnd the strange, subtle noiseThe fridge is famous for And the occasional buzz of the phoneAs it vibrates out
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I blame encyclopaedias
When I was ten years old or so, give or take, my parents fell under the thrall of a door to door salesman and bought a set of World Book Encyclopaedias. For the benefit of those who are younger than the internet, an encyclopaedia was a bunch of books that people looked up stuff in
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The more things change…
Amongst the books I was recently given was an old bird field guide, Bird Guide – Land Birds East of the Rockies From Parrots to Bluebirds, by Chester A. Reed. It looks like it is a reprint from 1944, originally copyrighted in 1906. One of the first thing that struck me, while I was reading
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Dreams From My Father, and just plain dreaming
Hmm, I don't know but it would seem to me that the asking price for these signed copies of Barack Obama's books is, hmmm, a little ambitious.
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Happy Birthday Mr. Peterson
Today marks what would have been the hundredth birthday of Roger Tory Peterson. It can be argued, quite easily I think, that no one is more responsible for the success of birdwatching as a hobby, avocation, or compulsion than him. He figures quite significantly in my development as a bird lover, for like many people
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Another book/iPod giveaway
While you're busy heading over to 10,000 Birds trying to win one of the ten copies of Smithsonian Guide to the Birds of North America or the iPod that they're giving away, you might as well head to Naturalist Notebook. Summer is also giving away a copy of the book and an iPod. And all
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Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds
I don't think it is possible to have too many Field Guides. It is almost the same as having too many tools, it just doesn't seem like there could be an theoretical limit. Harper Collins has just published an excellent new one, for those of us who like to get as many as possible, or
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Franklin,
It is always interesting to read of the modern popular take of Sir John Franklin as “unimaginative” incompetent and the author of his final Arctic Expeditions demise (see the comments in this CBC article). Franklin was chosen, partly because of lobbying, but partly because he was the British Officer with the most Arctic experience. His
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Cool… cool… I want one.
When I travel I like to keep a journal, although I have to admit that I haven’t been very diligent the last couple of trips. Normally I use a simple bound sketchbook (I have dreams of being able to sketch. Much like my dreams of playing an instrument they die when I discover it takes
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The Young Birder’s Guide
One of the challenges to introducing youth to watching birds is the lack of age appropriate reference materials, such as field guides. That has just changed with the release of The Young Birder’s Guide: to the birds of eastern North America, the latest in the Peterson Field Guide series. Written by Bill Thompson III, he