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Recent Books Of a Feather Other writing |
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Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding Harcourt Hardcover: September, 2007 ISBN-13/EAN: 9780151012473 368 pages From the moment Europeans arrived in North America, they were awestruck by a continent awash with birds-great flocks of wild pigeons, prairies teeming with grouse, woodlands alive with brilliantly patterned songbirds. Of a Feather traces the colorful origins of American birding: the frontier ornithologists who collected eggs between border skirmishes; the society matrons who organized the first effective conservation movement; and the luminaries with checkered pasts, such as Alexander Wilson (a convicted blackmailer) and the endlessly self-mythologizing John James Audubon. Scott Weidensaul also recounts the explosive growth of modern birding that began when an awkward schoolteacher named Roger Tory Peterson published A Field Guide to the Birds in 1934. Today birding counts iPod-wearing teens and obsessive listers among its tens of millions of participants, making what was once an eccentric hobby into something so completely mainstream it's now (almost) cool. This compulsively readable popular history will surely find a roost on every birder's shelf. • Reviews
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Return to Wild America: A Yearlong Search for the Continent's Natural Soul North Point Press, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN: 0-86547-688-8 Hardcover: November 2005 416 pages In 1953, birding guru Roger Tory Peterson and noted British naturalist James Fisher set out on what became a legendary journey - a 100-day trek over 30,000 miles around North America. They traveled from Newfoundland to Florida, deep into the heart of Mexico, through the Southwest, the Pacific Northwest, and into Alaska's Pribilof Islands. Two years later, Wild America, their classic account of the trip, was published. On the eve of that book's fiftieth anniversary, naturalist Scott Weidensaul retraces Peterson and Fisher's steps to tell the story of wild America today. How has the continent's natural landscape changed over the past fifty years? How have the wildlife, the rivers, and the rugged, untouched terrain fared? The journey takes Weidensaul to the coastal communities of Newfoundland, where he examines the devastating impact of the Atlantic cod fishery's collapse on the ecosystem; to Florida, where he charts the virtual extinction of the great wading bird colonies that Peterson and Fisher once documented; to the Mexican tropics of Xilitla, which have become a growing center of ecotourism since Fisher and Peterson's exposition. And perhaps most surprising of all, Weidensaul finds that much of what Peterson and Fisher discovered remains untouched by the industrial developments of the last fifty years. Poised to become a classic in its own right, Return to Wild America is a sweeping survey of the natural soul of North America today. • Reviews • Table of contents • Excerpt |
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The Ghost with Trembling Wings: Science, Wishful Thinking and the Search for Lost Species North Point Press, a division of Farrar, Straus & Giroux ISBN: 0-374-24664-5 Hardcover: April 2002 Paperback: June 2003 341 pages Three or four times an hour, eighty or more times a day, a unique species of plant or animal vanishes forever. It is, scientists say, the worst global extinction crisis in the last 65 million years -- the hemorrhage of thirty-thousand irreplaceable life forms each year. And yet, every so often one of these lost species resurfaces -- such as the Indian forest-owlet, considered extinct for more than a century until it was rediscovered in 1997, or Gilbert's potoroo, an endearing marsupial lost for 125 years until it was found in western Australia in 1994. Like heirlooms plucked from a burning house, they are gifts to an increasingly impoverished world. In The Ghost with Trembling Wings, naturalist Scott Weidensaul pursues these stories of loss and recovery, of endurance against the odds, and of surprising resurrections. The search takes Weidensaul to the rain forests of the Caribbean and Brazil in pursuit of long-lost birds, to the rugged mountains of Tasmania for the striped, wolflike marsupial known as the thylacine, to cloning laboratories where scientists struggle to recreate long-extinct animals, and even to the moorlands and tidy farms of England on the trail of mysterious black panthers whose existence seems to depend more on the faith of those looking for them. The Ghost with Trembling Wings is a book of exploration and a survey of the frontiers of modern science and wildlife biology. It is, in the end, the story of our desire for a wilder, bigger, more complete world. • Reviews • Table of contents • Excerpt |
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"Thrilling and Informative"
New York Times |
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Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds North Point Press, a division of Farrar, Straus & Giroux ISBN: 0-86547-543-1 Hardcover: April 1999 Paperback: April 2000 420 pages --Finalist, 2000 Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction-- At every moment of every day, morning or midnight regardless of the season, there are birds aloft in the skies of the Western Hemisphere, migrating. If it is spring or fall, the great pivot points of the year, then the continents are swarming with billions of traveling birds -- a flood so great even the most ignorant or unobservant notice the skeins of geese or the flocks of robins. Bird migration is the one truly unifying natural phenomenon in the world, stitching the continents together in a way that even the great weather systems, which roar out of the poles but fizzle at the equator, fail to do. In Living on the Wind, a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, Scott Weidensaul follows awesome kettles of hawks over the Mexican coastal plain, the bar-tailed godwits that hitchhike on gale winds 6,800 miles nonstop across the Pacific from Alaska to New Zealand, and the myriad songbirds whose numbers have declined so drastically in recent decades. Migration paths form an elaborate global web that shows serious signs of fraying, and Weidensaul delves into the tragedies of habitat degradation and deforestation with an urgency that brings life to the vast problems these miraculous migrants now face, while illuminating what may be the most compelling drama in the natural world. • Reviews • Table of contents • Excerpt |
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Mountains of the Heart: A Natural History of the Appalachians Fulcrum Publishing ISBN: 1-55591-139-0 Hardcover: 1994 Paperback: 2000 276 pages Stretching almost unbroken from the hills of north Alabama to a lonely, subarctic island off the northern coast of Newfoundland, the Appalachians are one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world, and among the most fascinating. In Mountains of the Heart, Scott Weidensaul shows how geology, ecology, climate, evolution and more than 10,000 years of human history have shaped one of the continent's greatest landscape features into an ecosystem of unmatched diversity and beauty. It is a mountain range of breathtaking scope, from the moist, fertile cove forests of the southern Appalachians, debecked with wildflowers and home to one of the most diverse temperate faunas in the world, to the cold, boreal north, where caribou, seabirds and even a few polar bears roam. In between, Mountains of the Heart traces the long, sinuous line of this fabled mountain system, and the long interaction between nature and humanity that has made it what it is today. Ted Williams, conservation editor for Audubon magazine, called it "the sort of book yearned for by all who cherish wild things and wild places," and syndicated nature columnist Scott Shalaway called Mountains of the Heart "a fascinating blend of geology, geography, biology and ecology by a gifted naturalist and writer. If you buy one nature book this year, make it this one." • Table of Contents |
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The Raptor Almanac: A Comprehensive Guide to Eagles, Hawks, Falcons and Vultures (Originally published as Raptors: The Birds of Prey) The Lyons Press Original publication 1996. Rereleased in hardcover under new title in 2001, and in paperback July 2004 ISBN: 1-59228-358-6 392 pages The Raptor Almanac is a comprehensive reference to the 310 species of diurnal (day-flying) birds of prey worldwide, including hawks, eagles, falcons, and vultures. For the birder or naturalist who wants to go beyond the fundamentals, and especially for anyone fascinated by birds of prey, The Raptor Almanac gathers virtually every important fact about these birds. The book covers raptor evolution, taxonomy, behavior, courtship and breeding, nesting, migration, human and bird interaction, environmental threats, and conservation efforts - from the well-known programs to reintroduce the California condor and peregrine falcon, to lesser-known efforts to preserve the snail kite and the ferruginous hawk. This full-color volume is an indispensable guide for all birders, raptor enthusiasts and for anyone interested in the natural world Author's Disclaimer: Readers should be aware that this reissue of my 1996 book was done by the publisher without my knowledge, and was marketed as an entirely new title even though it was not revised or updated in any way. While I am pleased the book is again in print, I am embarrassed to see that Lyons Press (an imprint of Globe Pequot) has promoted it as though it was a new book. |
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The Wildlife Art of Ned Smith Stackpole Books ISBN: 0-8117-0063-1 Hardcover: October 2003 128 pages (125 color paintings, 35 b/w drawings) Among the finest nature artists of the 20th century, Ned Smith created thousands of breathtaking paintings and drawings during his 45-year career. Self-taught not only in art but in the natural sciences, he nevertheless brought a remarkable breadth of knowledge to his art, infusing his work with a visible understanding of place, season and subject that few other artists have matched. Now for the first time, Smith's wildlife paintings, pen-and-ink drawings and field sketches – many never before published - have been collected and presented in a handsome, full-color format. The book traces the arc of his career, including his long and fruitful association with magazines like Game News and National Wildlife. |
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Seasonal Guide to the Natural Year: New England and New York; Fulcrum 1993
Seasonal Guide to the Natural Year: Mid-Atlantic; Fulcrum, 1992
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article, "The Last Stand in the Boreal," Nature Conservancy (Summer 2007) "Weekend America," Oct. 28, 2006: "Song from the Wood," New York Times, May 30, 2006 "Red Knots in a Bind," Defenders, Winter 2006 |
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A researcher in the Aleutian Islands cradles a whiskered auklet, one of the least-studied birds in North America.
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"Across the Gulf on a Wing and Prayer," Nature Conservancy, Spring 2004.
"Stitching the Pieces Together, One Wing at a Time," Patagonia, Winter 2003
"Raising the Dead," Audubon, May/June 2002
"Sage Grouse Strut Their Stuff," Smithsonian, June 2001
© Scott Weidensaul 2006-2007
All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part, in any form or medium, without express written permission is prohibited.
All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part, in any form or medium, without express written permission is prohibited.