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Jul 11, 2010
Bobolinks are nesting in grassy meadows, the father bird encouraging his somber-coated mate with his rollicking flight-song. Between the pickerel weed and arrowhead of the shallow brook, the hawk moth flits from flower to flower, simulating so closely that gem in feathers that many persons take it for a hummingbird.
Jul 11, 2010
Marga was eight days out of her shell when she first opened her eyes and saw the world as it looks from the sea-girt ledges of Gannet Rock, a little promontory of Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel.
Jul 11, 2010
Before she knew it, Marga the Gannet of Lundy Island was covered with a beautiful soft downy coat. By the time she was nine weeks old the down had vanished and her real feathers had begun to grow, first on her tail, then on wings and body.
Jul 11, 2010
All is calm on Lundy Island, until suddenly the sentinel gannet would stop and abruptly scream out a terrible "Bir! Bir!" that meant, "Look out! Danger!"
Jul 11, 2010
If Marga the gannet had ever been to sea and looked back at Gannet Rock she could have seen that only a few ledges were still occupied by the birds. The nests and the chalky white of the guano still lined the cliffs all around the islandmany miles of ledges that had once held, some say, ten thousand families of gannets.
Jul 11, 2010
Tiger moths, so called from the beauty of their variegated coloring and not from any ferocious tendencies, are contrastedly spotted and banded, or pure snow white. They have moderately broadwings and stout bodies, and are among our fairly large species of moths.
Jul 11, 2010
From time immemorial Gah-mi-squa-wa-ko-kag Saga-eegan was the rendezvous of the Indian. So much had transpired by the shores of this lake in ages gone by that it was also the favorite haunting place of the spirits.
Jul 11, 2010
It is estimated that something like sixteen million tons of rain and snow falls upon the surface of the earth, on an average, every second. Day after day, year after year, and century after century this prodigious downpour goes on; yet the oceans get no fuller, the land, as a whole, gets no damper, andstrangest of allthe atmosphere, despite this tremendous drainage of its moisture, gets no drier.
Jul 11, 2010
The effects of atmospheric thirst are numerous and striking. When it is excessive it may cause plants to wilt even when they are supplied with abundant water from the soil. Thus a well-irrigated orange grove is sometimes much injured by a hot, dry wind.
Jul 11, 2010
The blanket of water vapor that forms over a large body of water prevents the wind from exercising its full effect in promoting evaporation, and measurements made with isolated pans in the same desert give values nearly twice as great.
Jul 11, 2010
The New York State Commission on Ventilation made a number of experiments in supplying moisture to the air of schoolrooms, and reached the conclusion that this process produces no marked improvement in either the health, or the efficiency of the children.
Jul 10, 2010
The old style of taxidermy exhibited single animals mounted four-square on a wooden base, doing nothing, or totally unrelated to their surroundings. Modern taxidermy takes several animals, often a familymale, female, and youngand exhibits them in their natural surroundings, in life-like positions, engaged in some customary action, which generally exemplifies the chief characteristic in the life history of the species.
Jul 10, 2010
The days are past when the taxidermist would wrap a bale of hay around a clumsy wooden frame. He has become sculptor as he models the anatomy of his beasts. Often months are spent in this modeling, each muscle and sinew is now reproduced. The animal must seem alive when it is completed. Meanwhile like an obligato to the main theme of animal sculpture, foliage and accessories for the group are made.
Jul 10, 2010
Crash! Bumpbumpbump. Crash!" The thick underbrush of beech saplings swayed masily. From the matted foliage where some heavy object had crushed a path, one sturdy beechling jerked itself erect. A sudden rifle shot; the whine of a bullet; a dull falll; a thrashing of leavessilence. The big bear is dead. "Well, old timer, your troubles are over but mine have just begun." The voice of the museum man, skillfully setting to work
Jul 10, 2010
The star Betelgeuse is a very different type of star from the brilliant bluish-white or white Orion stars. It is reddish in color and varies irregularly in brightness. Its distance from the earth is only about 160 light years as compared with a distance of over six hundred light years for Rigel, the three stars in the Belt, the stars in the Sword of Orion, and other Orion stars. Betelgeuse is one of the red giant stars and it has a diameter of over two hundred million miles.
Jul 10, 2010
Finest of all the constellations is the glorious Orion, the warrior-giant of the ancients, which is now conspicuously in view in the southeastern sky. Orion is easily recognized by the line of three bright stars that form the Belt of Orion and by the huge quadrilateral that outlines the body. The ruddy Betelgeusean Arabic word that means "arm-pit"marks the giant's right shoulder. The magnificent, bluish-white star, Rigel, lies in the left foot.
Jul 10, 2010
At any time during the day on the Nova Scotia coastline a mother merganser and her young, numbering fifteen or sixteen, may come splashing by, making the silver spray fly about their heads, as they scurry along or suddenly dive to catch minnows. At night a pair of barred owls, who have always lived about the lake, continually start the echoes answering their weird calls - sounds which must frighten many little people of the forest, on whom these birds are accustomed to prey.
Jul 10, 2010
In the heart of the beautiful wilderness of Nova Scotia nestles a tiny lake, hidden among the trees. It has no inlet, so it is as clear as a spring, and one can see the bottom almost everywhere. On a fine summer day a gentle breeze makes a thousand little wavelets dance on the water, while the golden sun softly kisses them and makes them glitter like many little sparkling diamonds. Nothing can be more exquisite.
Jul 10, 2010
What chiefly distinguishes Thomas Nuttalls Manual of the Ornithology of the United States and Canada, is a virtue rare in scientific works, a fine literary style. There is nothing over-personal or elaborate in Nuttall's Manual such as there is in Audubon's "Biographies" or Rafinesques writings. The beauty of Nuttall's phrase and diction is not something perceived at once, as it would be in a poet's style:
Jul 10, 2010
Botanist Thomas Nuttall's reputation in the early 1800s was by now a fine one, and he had written many articles and several splendid botany books, the value of which we are apt to forget because his discoveries have now been incorporated into larger and more recent works. But the excellence of his botanical studies won him the position of curator of the botanical garden of Harvard University.
Jul 10, 2010
On his printer's type case was propped before a young apprentice in a shop in Liverpool a book on Natural History which he read while he ought to have been setting the type for Priestly's great treatise on chemistry. The other young printers eyed their fellow worker, Thomas Nuttall, askance, and wondered just how long it would be before the master printer would come in and, discovering how Nuttall passed his time, would discharge him.
Jul 10, 2010
Discovering long lost treasures in the plant, and animal kingdoms, has always ben the attraction of scientists, and botanists, and can be as exciting as any Boys Own Story of derring do. The history of a missing flower is almost as romantic an episode as the case of the missing Kokuh dove of 1803, as it links up the present-day activities of botanists with the more exciting era in Colonial times when the woods
Jul 10, 2010
A rare dove, a lovely flower, a unique cactus, and a rodent that naturalists knew about and wanted to find again, are the four latest wonders of the world of science to turn up after their mysterious disappearance for well over a hundred years. The bird in question is the Marquesas dove, a rather small species that was originally discovered by Captain Adam von Krusentern while making a three years' voyage through the Pacific in 1803.
Jul 10, 2010
Because a few species of hawk sometimes kill game birds, the entire class is condemned. There are those, and they are many, who fail to see that birds of prey fill an important part in the great scheme of Nature. Does the hunter who shoots down the hawk at every opportunity, because some species occasionally captures what he is pleased to consider his special property,
Jul 10, 2010
In the days when America had hawks, they were, in the popular mind, either hen-hawks or chicken-hawks, according to size, and in the opinion of the poultry raiser lived almost exclusively on the barnyard bird. To those interested in shooting, either for sport or gain (for market hunting was then regularly followed as a part-time occupation by many), game was supposed to be the hawk's staple food. In other words, he had few friends among those who had power to do him harm.
Jul 10, 2010
The skill, daring and intelligence of hawks early excited the admiration of man, and the arts of the early Persians and Egyptians testify to the antiquity of falconrythe capture of game by trained hawks. Its practice in China, India and other eastern countries also predates the written record. From these lands falconry spread to Europe, where by the ninth century it was a fashionable sport.
Jul 9, 2010
It was midnight, as I sat on a camp-stool, and looked at the octopus, and he looked at me. Lights had been out in the aquarium since sunset, and I was locked in there alone, armed only with my flash light. For some months I had been having deep thoughts about the great silent world of fish, living, day and night, in the shadow of the oceans.
Jul 9, 2010
In Selborne, his book on swallows, White says in early spring, he would notice a few of them about. They would disappear again if the weather happened to turn cold and stormy, and he concluded that they had gone back to their place of hibernation.
Jul 9, 2010
They objected to my presence in the loft near the nest, the swallows fluttering rapidly about and uttering a sharp, scolding note. I noticed that father had the same experience with barn swallows in the barn at Woodchuck Lodge, and he translated this scolding note as "Sleet", "Sleet."
Jul 9, 2010
In his seminal book on swallows entitled Selborne, White says, "Careful workmen when they build mud walls (informed at first perhaps by this little bird) raise but a moderate layer at a time."
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