In honor of Superb Owl Sunday 2019, I can’t think of a more appropriate new book to bring to everyone’s attention than James Duncan’s lavishly illustrated “Owls of the World.”
New and forthcoming books that are worthy of attention but that have not been fully reviewed.
In honor of Superb Owl Sunday 2019, I can’t think of a more appropriate new book to bring to everyone’s attention than James Duncan’s lavishly illustrated “Owls of the World.”
Yaffle. The very first time I heard this widely used British colloquial name for the Green Woodpecker I was instantly taken by it. Thought to have been derived in the Eighteenth Century from the call made by the species, yaffle so well expresses the Zeitgeist of this ground-loving member of the woodpecker family that once learned it’s difficult to call it by its official common name.
When something is decreasing in quality, the common expression is that it has “gone to the dogs.” (As a dog enthusiast, I’ve never been particularly fond of this expression, but there it is…) However as the cover of the new second edition of the the Princeton Field Guide series’ Carnivores of the World has “gone from the dogs” of its first edition “to the cats,” can we interpret this as a sign that it has increased in quality?
To anyone who has ever stumbled across one while strolling through a woodland, vernal pools seem to border right on the edge of magical. Disconnected as they are from other water sources, there’s something so remarkably serene about them that they almost beggar belief. And when the dappled light filtering through the trees is added to the experience, one wouldn’t be entirely surprised should one of the faerie folk suddenly appear out of the greenery just across the pond.