Books
I've not been birding, well not much anyway. One of the main reasons in Boulder was snow and below freezing temperatures, the second was lack of transportation. I think I'm slowly getting used to both in a reluctant sort of way. But I'm taking a lesser number of courses this time and the big burden of the M.Phil defense is now behind me. I hope I can get out a bit more this semester.
Read a couple of great books though, so I thought I'd blog about those. The first was "Loke Wan Tho's Birds", a coffee-table book sent to me for my birthday. It includes some of Loke Wan Tho's (LWT) black and white bird photographs and excerpts from his diary. I loved the bird photos, many of them taken during the field surveys with Salim Ali. He describes his first visit to the Rann of Kutch:
"Salim returns with exciting tale of trio to Flamingo breeding grounds. Start in darkness, guide going by the stars. Pure white salt of Rann below and starlight above indescribably beautiful. Cross miles and miles of shallow water and come to earthen mound-like nests of Flamingoes which were dark brown in colour and stand out like mountains in surrounding dazzling whiteness of Rann..."
He has several interesting tales about birding with Salim Ali and there's one photograph in the book that I really loved- probably taken by someone other than LWT? It shows LWT and SA walking purposefully down a long road leading down a slope. It's titled 'Walking the Mile' and it seems to capture the adventure, hardship and excitement that exploration entails.
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The second was Aldo Leopod's 'A Sand County Almanac', which I picked up at the visitor centre in Glacier NP (never got round to blogging about that trip!). The book is a classic and also has a couple of essays that describe in detail some of Leopold's ideas about conservation. For him, equally relevant are education and the ability to be perceptive about nature. But most importantly perhaps, the ability to be humble. Here, he talks about different kinds of outdoor recreation from hunting to birdwatching to isolation and a sense of community with the land.
"...the rudimentary grades of outdoor recreation consume their resource base; the higher grades, at least to a degree, create their own satisfactions with little or no attrition of land or life. It is the expansion of transport without a corresponding growth of perception that threatens us with qualitative bankruptcy of the recreational process. Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind."
There are many other insights in his essays, reflections of a scientist's mind and the experience of managing the wilderness areas in the U.S. In addition of course are the nature essays, which are hard to quote as there are so many things he describes pithily and tenderly. I'm happily re-reading this one.
Read a couple of great books though, so I thought I'd blog about those. The first was "Loke Wan Tho's Birds", a coffee-table book sent to me for my birthday. It includes some of Loke Wan Tho's (LWT) black and white bird photographs and excerpts from his diary. I loved the bird photos, many of them taken during the field surveys with Salim Ali. He describes his first visit to the Rann of Kutch:
"Salim returns with exciting tale of trio to Flamingo breeding grounds. Start in darkness, guide going by the stars. Pure white salt of Rann below and starlight above indescribably beautiful. Cross miles and miles of shallow water and come to earthen mound-like nests of Flamingoes which were dark brown in colour and stand out like mountains in surrounding dazzling whiteness of Rann..."
He has several interesting tales about birding with Salim Ali and there's one photograph in the book that I really loved- probably taken by someone other than LWT? It shows LWT and SA walking purposefully down a long road leading down a slope. It's titled 'Walking the Mile' and it seems to capture the adventure, hardship and excitement that exploration entails.
---
The second was Aldo Leopod's 'A Sand County Almanac', which I picked up at the visitor centre in Glacier NP (never got round to blogging about that trip!). The book is a classic and also has a couple of essays that describe in detail some of Leopold's ideas about conservation. For him, equally relevant are education and the ability to be perceptive about nature. But most importantly perhaps, the ability to be humble. Here, he talks about different kinds of outdoor recreation from hunting to birdwatching to isolation and a sense of community with the land.
"...the rudimentary grades of outdoor recreation consume their resource base; the higher grades, at least to a degree, create their own satisfactions with little or no attrition of land or life. It is the expansion of transport without a corresponding growth of perception that threatens us with qualitative bankruptcy of the recreational process. Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind."
There are many other insights in his essays, reflections of a scientist's mind and the experience of managing the wilderness areas in the U.S. In addition of course are the nature essays, which are hard to quote as there are so many things he describes pithily and tenderly. I'm happily re-reading this one.