Dr. Roberta L. Bondar’s good-looking new e book of pictures, House for Birds: Patterns and Parallels of Magnificence and Flight, is available in two halves, but it surely has a number of topics and a number of viewpoints.
Half One of many e book issues the Lesser Flamingo, which has, Dr. Bondar observes, 4 separate wild populations on the earth, in Africa and western India and Pakistan. The most important such inhabitants is within the East African Rift Valley, which hosts the best breeding exercise on Lake Natron, in an endorheic basin (its water by no means reaches the ocean) a part of which is proven beneath:
(Picture credit score: ESRS, NASA Johnson House Middle).
The strangeness of that picture is a results of seasonal evaporation exceeding the water influx, thus permitting salt to pay attention and organisms that thrive in it to prosper. However the different distinctive function of the picture is that it was taken from outer house, as many images within the e book have been (thus, the title).
Certainly, one of many pleasures of the e book is that the images have been taken from totally different factors of view: from the bottom, like this one, of flamingos feeding at Lake Borgoria Nationwide Reserve, additionally within the Rift Valley (the curved beak being positioned the wrong way up within the water, with the nostrils above the floor):
. . . and from the air, like this one, titled “A flamboyant shoreline,”
. . . and of terrain and setting (just like the one in every of Lake Natron, above), from astronauts on the Worldwide House Station, to which Dr. Bondar offered the coordinates for the pictures she wished, in addition to earlier NASA missions. The photographs of Earth from house, she says, “can provoke a change in how we view ourselves and the significance of non-human life.”
The second half of the e book is dedicated to the Whooping Crane, and the distinction between the flamingo images in Half One and the whoopers in Half Two (distinction by way of numbers, that’s) is stark. That’s not stunning: as Dr. Bondar notes, Lesser Flamingoes are categorised as “close to threatened,” with a world inhabitants over two million, the Whooping Crane is “endangered,” with a 2023 inhabitants estimated at lower than a thousand. Thus, whereas many or many of the flamingoes are proven in flocks of a whole lot or extra (akin to this aptly titled “Choice Time”)
. . . the whoopers are proven largely in pairs, or in pairs with younger (akin to this one, with the brownish “colt” barely seen to the precise of one in every of its dad and mom):
That picture, like most of the others in Half Two of the e book, was taken on the Wooden Buffalo Nationwide Park, now the principle breeding and nesting habitat for the world’s remaining Whooping Cranes. It’s an amazing wetland (bigger in space than Switzerland) of bizarre magnificence, as proven by Dr. Bondar’s images, however to this point up in Canada that the e book contains few images of the Park from outer house — the Worldwide House Station and NASA flight paths don’t cowl these far northern latitudes.
Within the fall, the whoopers undertake a 29-day, 2,600 mile migration from Canada to southern Texas, the place they reside within the Aransas Nationwide Wildlife Refuge, and eat as many as eighty blue crabs (in addition to different vegetation and animals) a day:
Dr. Bondar, an astronaut herself, a Canadian, is clearly a talented photographer (and all of the images within the textual content of this assessment however the first one are hers). It have to be mentioned, although, that as a author she typically wobbles; her gnomic prose can depart a reader scratching his head: “Whereas science satisfies the curiosity, it is just for the second. Whereas artwork provokes thought, it, too is evanescent.” (I’m nonetheless attempting to determine that one out.)
However she additionally contains sufficient factual data to make the studying properly worthwhile, stuff that the layperson could not know: for instance, whoopers, not like swans and pelicans (and flamingoes) shouldn’t have webbed ft; and (that is marvelous) they’ve been identified to fly as much as 5 miles out of their option to keep away from wind generators.
In 1941, there have been solely fourteen Whooping Crane adults and two juveniles left on the earth. As Dr. Bondar factors out, there’s some hope for a continued revival of the inhabitants, although some well-meaning efforts up to now (interbreeding with Sandhill Cranes; efforts to introduce a Florida inhabitants) have been largely fruitless. (This can be a story additionally well-told in a single chapter of Peter Matthiessen’s advantageous 2001 e book, The Birds of Heaven: Travels With Cranes.)
House for Birds is a stupendous e book, fairly well-designed — besides, oddly and annoyingly, for the web page numbers, printed in an ink colour so faint as to merge with the colour of the web page and be virtually unreadable.
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House for Birds: Patterns and Parallels of Magnificence and Flight, by Dr. Roberta L. Bondar. Determine 1, Vancouver/Toronto/Berkeley. CAD $55, USD $45. September 17, 2024. ISBN 978-1-77327-245-0.