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, nevertheless it has a number of topics and a number of viewpoints.
Half One of many e-book considerations the Lesser Flamingo, which has, Dr. Bondar observes, 4 separate wild populations on the earth, in Africa and western India and Pakistan. The largest 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:
(Photograph 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 photograph is that it was taken from outer area, as many pictures within the e-book have been (thus, the title).
Certainly, one of many pleasures of the e-book is that the pictures have been taken from completely 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 supplied 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 pictures in Half One and the whoopers in Half Two (distinction by way of numbers, that’s) is stark. That’s not shocking: as Dr. Bondar notes, Lesser Flamingoes are labeled 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 a lot of the flamingoes are proven in flocks of tons of or extra (akin to this aptly titled “Determination 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 fitting of considered one of its dad and mom):
That photograph, 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 ideal wetland (bigger in space than Switzerland) of bizarre magnificence, as proven by Dr. Bondar’s pictures, however to date up in Canada that the e-book consists of few pictures 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 pictures within the textual content of this evaluate 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’s only for the second. Whereas artwork provokes thought, it, too is evanescent.” (I’m nonetheless attempting to determine that one out.)
However she additionally consists of sufficient factual information to make the studying effectively worthwhile, stuff that the layperson could not know: for instance, whoopers, not like swans and pelicans (and flamingoes) wouldn’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 the earth. As Dr. Bondar factors out, there may be some hope for a continued revival of the inhabitants, although some well-meaning efforts previously (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 tremendous 2001 e-book, The Birds of Heaven: Travels With Cranes.)
House for Birds is a phenomenal 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 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.
