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My essays have appeared in
SCIENTIFIC
AMERICAN EXPLORATIONS
The Big Sleep: The Hows and Whys of Hibernation
Pick Up and Go: The Hows and Whys of Migration
Downtown Rock Hound
SEATTLE MAGAZINE
Urban Safari: An Upstream Battle
Urban Safari: It's A Jungle Out There
SEATTLE TIMES PACIFIC NORTHWEST MAGAZINE
The Strange History of the Ship Canal
Playgrounds of the Imagination
Stories in Stone
HARVARD MAGAZINE
A Wrangle Over Darwin
Lessons in Stone
ANIMALS: THE JOURNAL OF THE MASSACHUSETTS
SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF CRUELTY TO ANIMALS
What's Good for the Goose
MERIDIAN: THE IN-FLIGHT MAGAZINE FOR
MIDWAY AIRLINES
The Mysterious Disappearance of the Franklin Trees
HORIZON AIR INFLIGHT MAGAZINE
Top Tree
SANCTUARY: THE JOURNAL OF THE MASSACHUSETTS
AUDUBON SOCIETY
Digging Boston: A Western Geologist Comes East
SEATTLE TIMES
Book Reviews
The Sibley Guide to Birds by David Sibley
Birds of North America by Kenn Kaufman
Flu by Gina Kolata
The Boilerplate Rhino by David Quammen
Halflives by Brooke Williams
HIGH COUNTRY NEWS
BOSTON GLOBE
THE NATURE CONSERVANCY
SUNSET
Scientific American
Explorations
The Big Sleep
The Hows and Whys of Hibernation
It's winter. The temperature is dropping and food supplies are dwindling.
What do you do? Humans turn up the heat, put on warmer clothes or travel
to Palm Springs. Most animals don't have such luxuries and must retreat
into burrows or caves and enter into a state of lethargy where they lower
their body temperature and shut down their metabolism until spring returns.
Some, like wood frogs, take this a step further and survive winter by
letting their bodies freeze solid, becoming frogsicles, while some insects
defy winter by preventing internal freezing down to -36°F.
Pick Up and Go
The Hows and Whys of Migration
As spring spreads across the land, it brings a fantastic movement of animals
as diverse as buffleheads, elk, and monarch butterflies. Why do temperature,
food, and mating requirements affect migration? How do animals use chemical
clues, celestial signs, and the earth's magnetic field to find their way?
Downtown Rock Hound
The Geological Stories of Rocks Used as Building Stones
What should you do if your kids really like the rocks and minerals
they see in school, and they want to know where they can learn more about
geology? Take them downtown to investigate buildings that display an assortment
of rocks, minerals, and fossils rivaling many natural landscapes. As opposed
to my other stories on building stones, this one takes a generic approach,
and does not focus on a specific locale.
Seattle Magazine
Urban Safari: An Upstream Battle
Where to see salmon in Seattle
Few Seattle scenes exemplify the wonders of the natural world better than
that of salmon struggling up the fish ladder at the Hiram M. Chittenden
Locks. Instinct combined with a powerful olfactory system have brought
these fish back to our area, and October is a prime time to observe and
appreciate their travels. Although the Locks are the best place to see
Seattle's piscine denizens, one can find salmon in Longfellow, Piper's,
Fauntleroy, and Thornton Creeks, all of which have seen native salmon
return after recent reclamation efforts.
Urban Safari: It's a Jungle Out There
A tour of the carved animals of downtown Seattle
Do you ever get the feeling that you're being watched as you stroll through
downtown Seattle? You are probably right. Hundreds of eyes peer out from
buildings, tracking your actions. These observers are neither human nor
electronic. Instead, they're animals—wolves, bears, sheep, even walruses.
A tour of our urban core reveals a veritable Noah's Ark's worth of carved
and molded creatures stalking your every step.
Seattle Times Pacific Northwest
Magazine
The Strange History of the Ship Canal
The History of Lake Washington Ship Canal
The history of the Lake Washington Ship Canal involves dreamers and schemers
who combined self-promotion, subterfuge, and politics to achieve their
goals. Contending forces ranged from one man with a shovel to the United
States Navy, who initially desired a safe place to dock their ships, to
local citizens, who stood to benefit financially from the canal. Despite
their differences, they all shared a common belief that nothing less was
at stake than the future direction of Seattle. And yet, nearly 150 years
after the canal idea was first proposed, the modern day canal serves few
of the purposes for which these forces battled.
Playgrounds of the Imagination
The Story of Seattle's Park System
Just 33 years after Seattle's founding in 1851, it had its first park
and 20 years after that, the city had a comprehensive plan for major parks
and parkways that would rival any found in the United States. Few cities
in the world can claim such an achievement. Today's citizens owe a debt
of gratitude to the landscape architect most responsible for crafting
this master plan—John Charles Olmsted. His firm worked in Seattle
for 34 years, designing 37 parks and playgrounds, creating a legacy valued
everyday by present-day residents.
Stories in Stone
Geologic and Cultural Tales of Rocks Used in Building
Stones in Seattle
Every time you walk through downtown Seattle you are traveling along a
geologic time line. A lengthy stroll could take you from the 1.6-billion-year-old
Finnish granite of 1000 2nd Avenue past the Seattle Art Museum and its
relatively young, 30- million-year-old limestone walls. A couple of blocks
later you could hunt for fossils, some up to four inches wide, embedded
in grey limestone at the Gap on 4th Avenue. You could then make a huge
leap toward the present by going underground to the Metro Bus Tunnels
to find Seattle's youngest building blocks, million-year-old travertine
from New Mexico.
Harvard
Magazine
A Wrangle Over Darwin
An Examination of the First American Debate on Evolution
With Charles Darwin's publication of On the Origin of Species in
1850, a debate began that has raged until the present. In America, the
first confrontation over the theory of natural selection was between Harvard
naturalist Louis Agassiz and Harvard botanist Asa Gray. The legacy of
this battle is found in minutes from public meetings, in professional
journals, and in the marginalia from the scientists' personal first edition
copies of On the Origin of Species.
Lessons in Stone
Geological and Cultural Tales of Rocks Used in Building
Stones at Harvard
In Cambridge, the best geology exhibits are on the Harvard campus, but
not in a gallery or museum. Instead, the buildings themselves are the
display cases. The university features a range of rocks equal to any assembled
by plate tectonics. One building reveals a world of marine fossils. Another
incorporates a gray and black granite that solidified hundreds of millions
of years ago and a third is made from a red sediment deposited in a land
teeming with dinosaurs.
Animals
What's Good for the Goose
The Controversial Issue of Urban Canada Geese
A V-shaped skein passing overhead with a cacophony of honks floating down
still epitomizes wildness and freedom for many people. They gaze up at
a squadron of honkers marveling as the bird's effortless flight heralds
the arrival of spring or forebodes the coming of winter. Contrast this
with the city dweller who just wants this magnificent bird to go away.
As humans have altered the urban environment and created goose nirvana,
urban Canada goose populations have skyrocketed, in many places going
from zero into the thousands over the last 40 years.
Meridian
The Mysterious Disappearance of the Franklin Trees
The Enigmatic History of Franklinia alatamaha
"We missed our way and fell four miles below Fort Barrington," wrote botanist
John Bartram on October 1, 1765, while traveling in a swampy region on
the coast of southeast Georgia. Rarely in botanical history has so small
a peregrination lead to such fortuitous results. On that day Bartram reported
a plant new to science—Franklinia alatamaha—the Franklin
tree, which went on to become one of the botanical world's most enigmatic
species.
Horizon
Air Magazine
Top Tree
A Personal Essay about Douglas Fir Trees
Three Douglas firs seduced my wife and me into buying our house in Seattle.
We had been looking for several weeks and had that day finally found two
interesting homes, when we located the trio of handsome Douglas firs towering
above a small, tan house. Both of us knew immediately that we wanted to
live beneath those trees, the largest of which I could not wrap my arms
completely around. We called our agent, made a bid the next day, and moved
in one month later. We have had no regrets since our seduction.
Sanctuary:
The Journal of the Massachusetts Audubon Society
Digging Boston: A Western Geologist comes East
A Personal Essay about Discovering the Geology of Massachusetts
When I moved to Boston last year my geologic knowledge of Massachusetts
could be summed up by two words—Plymouth Rock. Beyond that I knew
almost nothing about the region. In the seven months that I have lived
here, though, I have come to appreciate the subtle and often hidden geologic
stories of my new home.
I regularly review science and natural history books
for the Seattle Times.
A selection of books reviewed.
Birds of North America by
Kenn Kaufman
The Sibley Guide to Birds by David Allen Sibley
Birding and birds have been on quite a roll in recent weeks. Nearly
a third of all North Americans feeds birds, and in Washington state, according
to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, more than 1 million people watch
birds. A bird, albeit incorrectly indentified, plays a pivotal part in
the recently released film Charlie's Angels.
More important, a pair of innovative and beautiful bird books has recently been published by two of the country's best known birders, David Allen Sibley and Kenn Kaufman.
Weighing in at more than 2 1/2 pounds, The Sibley Guide to Birds is the larger and more heavily praised of the duo, called in ornithological circles "a quantum leap," "the high water mark for bird guides," and "a natural history book that changes the way people look at the world."
Kaufman's Birds of North America is no less unique. It incorporates an entirely new method of organization enhanced by the first ever field guide use of digitally altered photographs.
These books come at a time when birding is the fastest growing recreational activity in the country. Locally, the Seattle Audubon Society sells a ton of bird seed a week from its retail store in the Wedgewood neighborhood and fills more than 150 field trips per year. "I know that I see a lot more kids birding in Seattle now than when I was a kid in Tennessee in the 1970s. I have also noticed that birding is starting to cross ethnic and age boundaries," says Helen Ross, the society's local conservation coordinator.
Both Sibley and Kaufman started birding as youngsters. Like many kids, Kaufman was interested in the exotic aspects of nature, like tigers and volcanoes, but quickly realized he wouldn't find them in Indiana. "I started looking at birds because they were all around and I quickly discovered that they were fascinating creatures," said Kaufman in a recent interview.
David Allen Sibley was born into a bird-oriented family. He learned to bird from his father, ornithologist Fred Sibley, who directed the Point Reyes Bird Observatory and later curated vertebrates at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale. "I started birding when I was six and tracing bird pictures from Arthur Singer's Birds of the World at seven," Sibley said prior to a recent speech in Seattle.
He started sketching birds in the field and by age 12 knew he wanted to do a field guide. "I pictured a book that was more complete and filled with more details and more illustrations than any other." And he has done so.
The Sibley guide contains over 6,600 gouache paintings of 810 species and 350 regional populations. Instead of one or two drawings of each bird, he includes the array of plumage patterns from drab juveniles to colorful breeding adults, as well as birds in flight. For example, dark eyed juncos appear in 29 different drawings.
Good layout was also a central concern. "Turn to any page and all the birds have the same plumage across the page, so you can easily compare one species to the other," Sibley said. "All the birds face the same way and all are drawn at the same scale."
Sibley uses a method pioneered by Roger Tory Peterson in his field guides¤details that aid in identification are placed next to each bird generally with a line pointing to a specific feature. Sibley, however, uses up to 15 additional identification pointers per bird.
Kaufman also had aspirations from a young age. "I have fantasized putting together a guide since I was 11," he said. "They idea for this one, though, came about from a conversation with Roger Tory Peterson."
Peterson had just released his Western States guide. "Roger said he had included too much detail. Most guide books, his included, he said, were written with the assumption that the user would know what he was looking for before he had even opened the book. After this conversation, I decided I wanted to put together a book for someone who had never birded before."
Like Sibley, Kaufman has departed from the normal bird guide. Instead of organizing birds taxonomically, which puts loons first and finches last, he has placed birds into distinct groups such as "Ducks, Geese, and Swans" or Chicken-like Birds." These are further subdivided into categories with all birds within a group sharing a similar tabbed color code.
"To emphasize the more common birds, I put them at the top of the page," Kaufman said, "I wanted to make it easy to find the birds that a beginner would notice."
Kaufman's other innovation is his use of technology. He scanned over 2,000 photographs and invested over 3,000 hours digitally altering them for consistent size, color, and lighting; sharpening contrast and emphazing distinct field marks.
Both authors have carried their childhood passion into adulthood because birding is still exciting to them. "I have continued to bird because it is so unpredictable," said Sibley. "You know that birds are always around you but you never know which exact birds you are going to see. An addititional part of the excitement of birding for me is the intellectual challenge of identification. It's a reasoning puzzle. You look for a clues to deduce a name and from there you put the bird into a larger picture."
Kaufman supplemented this aspect of naming by noting its imporance to conservation. "Learning names helps you create a 3-dimensional picture of the bird's environment," he said. "You know where it came from and where its going. A name is an initial step in developing appreciation for nature, which in turn leads toward a better chance for protection."
In a society that places so much importance on speed and quickly turning out products, it is a pleasure to see the results of two people who have devoted their lives to quiet, careful, and detailed study.
The Boilerplate Rhino: Nature in the Eye of the
Beholder by David Quammen
For 15 years, David Quammen wrote a monthly column for Outside
magazine. For 15 years, I did not read it. I now realize the error of
my ways.
In The Boilerplate Rhino, Quammen has collected together columns from Outside that address how people interact with the natural world. His essays are humorous and informative. They make you think. They clearly reveal Quammen's passion for language and the pecularities of people and science.
In the introduction he writes, "Even a part-time misanthrope like myself has to admit that, of all the weird species that inhabit this planet, few are more richly and horrifically fascinating than Home sapiens." He fleshes out our pecularities in 26 essays that range across the planet from Baja to Bali examining subjects as diverse as the origins of the nutmeg trade, why big animal species don't thrive, and his goal of making Tyranosaurus rex the state bird of Montana.
His essay on his search for the Durian, a fruit "renowned throughout Asia for its luxuriant flavor, its peculiar anatomy, and its indecent stench" shows Quammen's thorough research, field time, and attention to details. I am ready to travel to the island of Ternate to find "The Great Stinking Clue."
One of Quammen's strengths is that he asks questions that most of us would not think of. Why are people so concerned with the relatively few dead dolphins and not with the millions of yellowfin tuna who perish in the same nets? Why don't owls have penises? How can cats always land on their feet and why do they survive their falls from high rise apartment buildings?
Reading these essays brought back fine memories of reading Quammen's John Burroughs Award-winning book Song of the Dodo and reminded me again that he is one of the most fascinating and thought provoking writers of natural history.
Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic
of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It
by Gina Kolata
Like most Americans, New York Times science writer Gina Kolata knew little
about the 1918 flu epidemic—until she began to research her new book,
Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search
for the Virus That Caused It. "I never consciously realized that there
had been this horrible flu epidemic in 1918 until I talked with Dr. Jeffrey
Taubenberger, who is one of the hereos of my book. He told me that it
was the worst infectious disease ever," she said in a recent interview.
"It is one of the most forgotten epidemics of the 20th century but it also touched millions of people on a very personal level. The big picture was lost because it didn't show up in history books," said Kolata. Her fascinating new book may change that traditional perspective on the disease.
The influenza virus first appeared in Boston in September, 1918. "One day you are young, strong and invulnerable [and then] You might notice a dull headache," writes Kolata. "You start to shiver…your muscles will ache…You start to cough up blood…you frantically gasp for breath. A blood tinged saliva bubbles out of your mouth. You die—by drowning, actually—as your lungs fill with reddish fluid." It may take a few days or a few hours.
"Some said it was a terrible new weapon of war," writes Kolata. They thought the Germans delivered it via Bayer aspirin, from u-boats, or from a camouflaged ship. No one knew where it came from but they saw the effects daily.
First soldiers began to die. The disease soon spread to urban areas and from there outward eventually reaching across the globe. By the end of 1918, when the epidemic mysteriously ended, somewhere between 20 and 100 million people had died worldwide. "Under ordinary circumstances, that would be the end of the story…But nothing about the 1918 flu was ordinary," writes Kolata.
In what may be the most intriguing part of the story, researchers in the 1990s have tracked down three specimens of the flu virus, preserved from remains of three people who died in 1918. These samples may provide the answer to one of the greatest questions of 20th century medicine: "Why was the 1918 flu virsus so deadly?"
Kolata begins the most recent chapter of this mystery with 74-year-old Swedish pathologist Johan Hultin, who in 1951 flew to Alaska and exhumed five bodies buried in permafrost and extracted lung tissue from people who died in the 1918 epidemic. He spent six weeks conducting every possible experiment to revive the virus. None succeeded.
Hultin stopped working on the virus until 1997, when he read a paper in Science by Taubenberger. Taubenberger and his associate, Ann Reid, described their discovery of the first genetic evidence ever of the 1918 flu virus. They did not have to go to Alaska to find their specimens. Instead, they acquired their preserved lung tissue from a Raiders of the Lost Ark-like warehouses in Washington D.C., where the military has been storing medical remains since the Civil War.
Encouraged by Taubenberger's research and racing another more high-profile search for a frozen sample, Hultin flew back to Alaska—by himself again—dug another body out of permafrost, and retrieved an important sample of lung tissue.
Taubenberger's team has now sequenced 3 of the 8 genes and they don't look unusual for a flu virus. That is a real shock because they thought theyÃd see the answer," said Kolata. Even with the latest tools in medical science, this most infectious of all diseases is still and abiding mystery. Researchers believe it may be another decade before they understand the virus well enough to know why it was so lethal.
Kolata's book is a well-written story of intrigue, individual perseverance, medical history, and scientific insights. On a more personal level, the book has changed Kolata. provides an illuminating example to this conundrum. "I never had a flu shot until this year. I thought I could get Guillain-Barré syndrome (a nerve disorder). Now, I don't worry about that anymore" because she's learned that the chance of getting the disease from a flu shot is extremely remote. "But it is only because I wrote this book," she said.
Halflives: Reconciling Work and Wildness
by Brooke Williams
The struggle between obligation and passion is a problem that many people
in the Pacific Northwest wrestle with every day. What if we are unhappy
at work but are afraid to break away? What if we find our true happiness
in the out of doors but are too busy to get out? How does one balance
these halflives, as Brooke Williams calls them?
A direct descendent of Mormon pioneer Brigham Young, Williams was cultivated to work in his family's fourth generation plumbing supply business. He had the outward appearance of the good life: new car every other year, latest skis and bikes, fancy dinners, season's tickets. And yet, he was unhappy and felt this veneer hid the true Brooke Williams, the one who telemarked challenging backcountry or explored seldom seen desert canyons.
In this personal search, Williams contrasts the challenges and frustrations of his life and his pursuits of wildness with profiles of several people who found the balance between work and wildness. Jeff Foott is a successful landscape and wildlife photographer who "had the courage to pick a fascinating, risky path over more comfortable and secure options," while Sally Cole has "melded her love of art and her passion for exploration into a career as a rock art archaeologist."
Williams ultimately quits his job after 16 years in the family business and starts his own company, which explores ways of balancing land preservation with economic development in rural communities. His rejection of the conventional, the expected, the accepted, forges his two halflives together, "so tightly joined that it is hard to tell the difference between them." But he also muses: "And even though I still go through dark periods, they're different now; they're more fertile and quiet times for me to assess which way to move next."
This book is neither a how-to-change manual nor a self-help guide. For Williams, no simple answer to his conundrum exists. He writes: "I still believe that life has two sides¤that each of us is an amalgam of nature and culture, wildness and work. Our challenge is to find the right mix, the balance, and the courage to make the necessary adjustments."
Other Reviews
The Island of Lost Maps by Miles Harvey
Life's Matrix: A Biography of Water by Philip Bal
Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource by Marq de Villiers
The Secret Knowledge of Water: Discovering the Essence of the American
Southwest by Craig Childs
Leap by Terry Tempest Williams
Galileo's Daughter by Dava Sobel
All material©David B. Williams 2000,2001,
2002.
All rights reserved, no form of reproduction is
authorized without prior arrangement with David B. Williams.
