Despite their vast, open stretches of sand where, other than some waving swaths of unusually hardy grasses, living things seem sparsely represented at best, the dunes of the Pacific Northwest are actually teeming with a wide ranging variety of life – if you know where to look.
When a new volume from the Animalibus series, Mary Sanders Pollock’s “Storytelling Apes; Primatology Narratives Past and Future” recently arrived on my desk, I made an immediate mental note: “don’t make any initial assumptions about this book – just read it from cover to cover and see where it takes you.”
After twenty-five years any reliable breeding bird atlas is bound to require updating if it is to present an accurate picture of the given geographic region’s reproducing avifauna. Thus, editors Rodewald, Shumar, Boone, Slager, and McCormac set out to bring the original Atlas of Breeding bird in Ohio up to date with the most recent information available about the state’s birdlife – the result being the newly released Second Atlas of Breeding Birds in Ohio from Penn State Press.
When you really come right down to it, it’s the little things that matter most; the small, too easily overlooked details that are the foundation upon which so much ultimately depends. In the oceans it’s the myriad forms of plankton that form the foundation of the food chains upon which so much of the life there depends, and on land it’s the mosses, fungi, lichen, and plants that live along the ground in the boundary layer between the earth and the atmosphere that likewise keep so many ecological systems running.