Browsing Books

1. Dave McNeely and Jim Henderson, Bob Bullock: God Bless Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008)
Bullock served as Democratic secretary of state, comptroller of public accounts, and lieutenant governor, ending his career as a politician in 1999. "He was an active volcano, and the eruptions were always intense, usually brief, and wholly unpredictable." The book may be ordered online from www.utexas.edu/utpress.

2. Mary S. Black, Early Texas Schools (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008)
The book includes Bruce F. Jordan's photographs of historically significant Texas school buildings from the 1850s to the 1930s and documents the development of Texas schools from the Republic to the modern universities of the Twentieth Century. The book may be ordered online from www.utexas.edu/utpress.

3. Have you ever thought that you saw or heard an ivory-billed woodpecker?  Here, in the context of a review of a splendid book, you will find a report of a first-hand sighting, along with a melancholy reflection on the fact that many experiences once ordinary have now become extraordinary, if possible at all. 

John Terborgl, offers a look at an interesting book in a review entitled “Hero of Birdland,” written for The New York Review of Books, Volume 54, Number 7, April 26, 2007.  Here is a lengthy excerpt from that review:

All Things Reconsidered: My Birding Adventures

by Roger Tory Peterson, edited by Bill Thompson III

Houghton Mifflin, 354 pp., $30.00

According to the US Forest Service, 70 million Americans call themselves bird-watchers, making bird-watching one of the most popular leisure activities of our time. It hasn't always been so. A century ago, bird watching as it is practiced today didn't exist. There were no field guides to help identify birds and binoculars were clumsy, expensive, and optically primitive by today's standards. The records people kept of the birds they sighted had no credibility. To prove you'd seen a bird you had to shoot it and prepare it as a specimen. Amateur enthusiasts gathered information about birds but largely through the now outlawed hobby of oology, egg collecting.  For the oologist, the rarer the bird, the more desirable was its clutch of eggs.  Oologists contributed to sharp declines in several species, including the peregrine falcon.

More benign ways of enjoying birds began to spread into popular culture in the early twentieth century. Previous centuries had seen grotesque abuses of nature in the US, such as the "side hunts" organized during the Christmas season as aimless competitions, the winner being the person who killed the most birds without regard to size, appearance, or potential edibility. Frank Chapman, an ornithologist at the American Museum of Natural History, responded to this outrage by proposing that people celebrate the holidays by counting birds instead of killing them. Thus originated the Christmas Bird Count in 1900 when twenty-seven observers took to the field to count birds in twenty-five locations across the country. A century later, the Christmas Count at the end of 2000 drew 52,471 observers to count birds in 1,823 localities in seventeen countries.

Without a doubt, the person who contributed most to this change was Roger Tory Peterson. For half a century, he was probably the best-known and most revered naturalist in the US. A modest man who carried himself with a quiet, informal dignity, Peterson brought multiple talents to a lifelong obsession with birds. He was first and foremost an artist, but in his later years turned to writing, lecturing, and photography. He became known to the American public upon the publication of A Guide to the Birds in 1934. The first printing of two thousand copies sold out in one week, an indication of the public's interest in birds. Peterson's guide was not the first illustrated bird book. Frank Chapman had written one more than a decade earlier.  What was so appealing about the Peterson guide was the impeccably accurate artistic quality of his colored illustrations and what later became known as the Peterson Identification System, the practice of adding small arrows to the drawings to flag key features that distinguished one species from another. The system immediately caught on and launched Peterson into a career of writing and overseeing the production of field guides. More than seventy guides in the series that bears his name are now in print, covering birds but vertebrates, invertebrates, and plants, even the stars and minerals. Among the many offerings of the series, there is something for nearly everyone; the titles include, for example, A Field Guide to Advanced Birding and A Field Guide to Feeder Birds.

Late in life, from 1984 until his death in 1996 at eighty-seven, he contributed a regular column, "All Things Reconsidered," to Bird Watcher's Digest. During these years he was still traveling actively, in part to indulge his passion for photographing birds. These travels carried him back to many of the places he had visited forty or fifty years earlier. The essays recount stories of his travels and traveling companions and his perceptions of changes in the environment of our continent and its bird populations over nearly haIfa century.

The essays, which have been collected in the anthology under review, each tell a story, and Peterson was a master of the art.  In one of the most poignant essays, Peterson recounts his most exciting birding experience, seeing an ivory-billed woodpecker. By 1940 there was plausible evidence of ivory-bills in only three states: Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana. Cornell graduate student James Tanner spent three years in the early 1940s slogging southern swamps and bayous to assess where and how the species could be saved. By his reckoning, no more than twenty-four ivory-bills remained in the entire Southeast. Despite a prodigious effort, he was able to locate only five, all of them in northeastern Louisiana in the Singer Tract, at 80,000 acres the largest stand of virgin timber then remaining in the Southeast. Armed with permits to enter the closed area, Peterson, with a companion and a guide, trudged a day and a half across the swamp, criss-crossing the moist bottomland and wading murky sloughs until they were brought up short by an unfamiliar call that has been likened to the sound produced by a clarinet mouthpiece (without the clarinet):

"With our hearts pounding, we tried to keep cool, hardly believing that this was it, the bird we had come fifteen hundred miles to see. We were dead certain this was no squirrel or lesser woodpecker, for an occasional blow would land - whop! - like the sound of an ax. Straining our eyes, we discovered the first bird, half hidden by leafage, and in a moment it leaped into the full sunlight. This was no puny pileated; this was a whacking big bird, with great white patches on its wings and a gleaming white bill."

The date was May 1942. The last ivory-bill was seen in the Singer Tract in December 1946. A few months later, the great forest that harbored the nation's last ivory-bills was razed to make way for agriculture.

While in the swamp, Peterson glimpsed a long-tailed creature he took to be a

Louisiana panther and noted footprints left by a family of red wolves. He didn't realize then that he was looking at living ghosts, for neither of these carnivores survives in Louisiana today.

Current monitoring efforts suggest the mixed countercurrents that underpin many of Peterson's essays. Let us set 1900 as the baseline. Since then, waterfowl have declined dramatically due to the draining of wetlands in both breeding and wintering areas.

Lately, grassland birds have become the category of greatest concern. The reasons are many. The native prairies of the Great Plains have either been converted to cropland or replanted in nonnative grasses. The advent of synthetic fertilizers in the mid-twentieth century permitted the intensification of farming and ended the traditional system of crop rotation with fallows. Even hay production has been intensified, so that grassland birds can no longer fledge their young in the spring before the hayfields are mowed. Sighting any of a long list of once common birds, among them, meadowlarks, grasshopper sparrows, and bobolinks, has thus become an exceptional event in a day's birding.