Northern Woodlands

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Golden Wings and Hairy Toes: Encounters with New England’s Most Imperiled Wildlife

In Golden Wings and Hairy Toes: Encounters with New England’s Most Imperiled Wildlife, Todd McLeish takes the reader on a lively and enlightening adventure with field biologists working to better understand the natural history, ecology, habitat requirements, and conservation status of 14 of New England’s rarest plants and animals. Throughout the book, McLeish clearly demonstrates his fascination and reverence for the natural world and his understanding of the complex challenges faced by conservation biologists in a rapidly changing world.

In the introduction, McLeish chronicles the extinction of the last known heath hen on Earth – a small population on Martha’s Vineyard, which, by 1931, was down to a single bird. One year later, the species was gone and, as McLeish points out, became “the first ornithological extinction observed in the wild down to the last individual.” The author weaves the heath hen story in with his own visit to the Martha’s Vineyard site where the last individual was observed and uses it to illustrate that, while much is being done to prevent future extinctions, immense challenges remain. He writes, “While extinction is indeed a natural process – as those advocating for progress at any cost emphasize time and again – the current rate of extinctions on Earth is anything but natural. Human actions have increased the extinction rate as many as one hundred to one thousand times greater than normal.”

Such a bleak outlook, however, is not pervasive in the 14 chapters that make up the book, each focusing on a different species: two fish, three mammals, three birds, three insects, one reptile, and two plants. Although many of the biologists he meets and tags along with express pessimism about the long-term prospects for the species they study, especially in light of major threats such as global warming and mercury poisoning, there are hopeful and positive elements in these chapters as well. He describes how industrial clearcutting in the North Woods of Maine benefits the lynx population, and how powerline corridors create excellent habitat for the golden-winged warbler, New England’s rarest songbird.

And, throughout the book, there is the adventure and excitement of being in the field with dedicated biologists – sharing their concerns and motivations, feeling their passions and frustrations, hearing their field humor, and gleaning little natural history tidbits that have taken years of field work to understand. Such as knowing what a Bicknell’s thrush “growl” sounds like and that it means the bird is “really pissed off,” or that the Karner blue butterfly can be identified by its erratic, “puppet-on-a-string” flight pattern. McLeish also makes it clear that field work is not always as glamorous as it may seem. Take his visit to Bird Island in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts, to learn about roseate terns: he notes that in his first three minutes on the island, he had been defecated on more times than in his previous 43 years combined.

Whether he’s searching for right whales aboard the research vessel Shearwater in Cape Cod Bay, snorkeling in a Massachusetts pond to help capture red-bellied cooter turtles, or mist-netting the Bicknell’s thrush on Vermont’s highest peak, McLeish never fails to humbly connect us with his subjects. He treats the reader to the nuances and subtleties that make each of these 14 species unique – as well as the people who study them – and in the process provides plenty of reasons to, as he says, “help postpone permanently the day that they, like the heath hen, disappear entirely.”

Reviewed by Steve Faccio

© 2007 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author’s consent.

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Natural Home Heating: The Complete Guide to Home Energy Options

If you consider that an estimated 25 percent of the energy used in the U.S. is spent heating buildings, and you feel that it would be beneficial if that energy came from sources other than the burning of fossil fuels, and you’d like to have at your fingertips a comprehensive layout of the alternative possibilities, then this is the book for you.

Even if you own a high-rise in Boston, you might just have your interest piqued by the notion of corn burners, pellet stoves, or heat pumps (more about these later); however, the author, Greg Pahl, states in his introduction that he is aiming this work at homeowners with the question, “How can a homeowner reduce or eliminate his/her use of fossil fuels?”

Comprehensive is the word for this piece of work. Pahl starts you off with the physics of heat, the basics of heating systems, fuel possibilities, and heat sources, and goes on from there to devote long, well-thought-out sections to solar, wood, biomass, and geothermal heat. Within each section, he ranges from the simple to the complex, from the most elementary (don’t shovel your wood ashes into a paper bag) to the arcane (if you illuminate 10 100-watt light bulbs for one hour [1 kWh], you have consumed 3,413 British Thermal Units [BTUs] of energy).

He tells you what equipment is available, how it operates, what it costs, and the pros and cons of running it. The information in this book is voluminous on all subjects. Did you know that historically the cheapest fuel (if you are buying it) is corn? That a masonry stove might cost you $12,000? That there are already 500,000 pellet stoves in the U.S. using 750,000 tons of pellets every year? Or that to determine the best angle for your solar collector, you subtract 15 degrees from your latitude for summer and add 15 degrees to your latitude in winter?

Pahl clearly has his preferences, and he hits his stride in the sections on biomass and geothermal heat. He likes pellet stoves and he prefers a hydronic (radiant hot water) delivery system. Pellets can be made from sawdust, bark, or other organic waste products and are delivered automatically and thermostatically into any size and type of heating system. The stoves can also be made to burn cherry or olive pits or corn, barley, wheat, and other grains.

Pahl’s real favorite is the heat pump – that is, his “geothermal” system. He likes it so much that by the time you finish this section you will know more about the physics and mechanics of heat pumps than you ever wanted to know. The heat pump is a technological marvel – almost a something-from-nothing proposition – and I’m sure it’s bound for glory, but my one small criticism of this wonderful book is that Pahl carries on about it long after the reader has grasped the idea.

Natural Home Heating will be very valuable for the novice searching for comparative information and perhaps surprising to the cut, split, and seasoned home heater.

Reviewed by Bob Machin

© 2007 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author’s consent.

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The Uses of Wild Plants: Using and Growing the Wild Plants of the United States and Canada

Frank Tozer is part of a growing group of people who see knowledge of wild plants as an important contribution to our collective future. This pursuit of knowledge need not be just an entertaining hobby, an intellectual curiosity, or a gourmet delight to be sampled occasionally; it can be a vehicle for well-being, an everyday source for the food, medicine, and materials we need to live our lives. In The Uses of Wild Plants, Tozer has created a volume with which to share his knowledge and enthusiasm for these plants.

Tozer offers an encyclopedic treatment, with entries for more than 1,200 species of plants found in North America. These cover both native and non-native plants and even give some new clues for getting rid of pesky invasives like wild parsnip, Pastinaca sativa. (Eat it! Wild parsnip is simply an escaped strain of the garden parsnip. Read the book for details.) The plants are alphabetized by scientific name, but if your Latin is a little rusty, there is an index of common names to help you navigate. Your favorite plant field guide will be handy to have along as well for identification of these plants in the wild.

In each entry, Tozer succinctly supplies the usual edible wild plant information, such as which parts to eat, when to harvest them, cautionary notes, and so on, but this is much more than simply an edible wild plants book. While food is the most common use of wild plants, Tozer’s most interesting entries venture further, exploring the history and potential of these plants as biofuels, animal fodder, fiber and building materials, and more.

Tozer also includes information on how to cultivate many of these plants, often arguing for their use in forest gardens and other forms of semi-wild productive landscaping. In this way, he encourages us to look beyond our current standards for food and material resources, to diversify, with the hope that getting to know and use new wild plants might help us to live more lightly on the land. If we can use what the land naturally offers, we can rely less heavily on the relatively few plants we already know how to use.

The text is accompanied by black-and-white line drawings of selected plants, making it attractive to the occasional browser as well as the intent student of wild plant lore. The book does, however, promulgate one unfortunate standard of wild plant literature: the omission of any references. While Tozer’s experience is surely broad, spanning over 40 years and two continents, this volume cannot be drawn strictly from his own experience, yet he gives us few clues as to where the information has come from, a troubling situation when you’re considering popping a new plant in your mouth. Nevertheless, this volume is packed with information that will surely enrich your rambles in the forests and fields and, with any luck, fill your plate when you return home for dinner.

Reviewed by Matt Peters

© 2007 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author’s consent.