Should the American Robins or Blue Jays, or any creature most humans can readily identify and see with regularity, rapidly decline in numbers, alarm bells would be rung near and far. However if the American Elms rapidly began to sicken and die, few but the most botanically astute would likely even notice until it was far too late.
Have you ever stopped to closely examine the wall of an old stone building? You should. It may be made of a particularly interesting type of stone, or contain tiny fossils that would be easily missed by the casual passer-by. Raymond Wiggers is an enthusiastic advocate of such investigations, and his new field guide to the structures of the Chicago area can open the door to such explorations to a wide range of readers.
Given the overwhelming popularity and extraordinary usefulness of Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s All About Birds web page, it isn’t surprising at all that the content of it would eventually be employed for the creation of a printed field guide.
The common definition of a weed is a wild plant growing in a place where humans don’t want it to be growing. The problem with this – aside from it being astonishingly arrogant of us toward the complexity of the natural world – is that it is also short-sighted, in that there may well be, and very likely is, more to the plant in question growing where it is growing than we can readily perceive and understand.