Dr. Roberta L. Bondar’s good-looking new e book of images, 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 this planet, 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 area, as many images within the e book had been (thus, the title).
Certainly, one of many pleasures of the e book is that the images had 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 other 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 considered one 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 area, 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 when it comes to numbers, that’s) is stark. That’s not stunning: as Dr. Bondar notes, Lesser Flamingoes are categorized 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 (reminiscent of this aptly titled “Resolution Time”)
. . . the whoopers are proven principally in pairs, or in pairs with younger (reminiscent of this one, with the brownish “colt” barely seen to the best of considered one of its mother and father):
That picture, like lots of the others in Half Two of the e book, was taken on the Wooden Buffalo Nationwide Park, now the primary breeding and nesting habitat for the world’s remaining Whooping Cranes. It’s an important wetland (bigger in space than Switzerland) of bizarre magnificence, as proven by Dr. Bondar’s images, however thus far up in Canada that the e book consists of few images of the Park from outer area — 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 evaluation however the first one are hers). It should be mentioned, although, that as a author she generally 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 making an attempt to determine that one out.)
However she additionally consists of sufficient factual data to make the studying properly worthwhile, stuff that the layperson might not know: for instance, whoopers, not like swans and pelicans (and flamingoes) don’t have webbed ft; and (that is marvelous) they’ve been identified to fly as much as 5 miles out of their method to keep away from wind generators.
In 1941, there have been solely fourteen Whooping Crane adults and two juveniles left on this planet. 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 principally fruitless. (It is a story additionally well-told in a single chapter of Peter Matthiessen’s superb 2001 e book, The Birds of Heaven: Travels With Cranes.)
House for Birds is a fantastic e book, fairly well-designed — besides, oddly and annoyingly, for the web page numbers, printed in an ink shade so faint as to merge with the colour of the web page and be nearly 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.
