| Book Review | Environmental History, 10.3

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 10.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

How the Earthquake Bird Got Its Name and Other Tales of an Unbalanced Nature. By H. H. Shugart. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. xii + 227 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $27.50.

Several species of American rodents build large nests, or middens, to protect themselves from predators such as bears, pumas, coyotes, and foxes. This has earned them not only the name packrats but also almost mythical habits of either stealing material for their middens or "trading" for example a stick for something more desirable. Middens can consist of virtually any kind of plant material but the rodent will use bones, animal droppings and most kinds of litter that they can find. To further strengthen the constructions, the rodents urinate on them, thus allowing them to last for thousands of years. Since packrats collect all their material within a radius of thirty meters, aged middens actually provide plaeoecologists with a "detailed snapshot into the deep past" (p. 47) making it possible to determine how the plant life of a specific area looked thousands of years ago.

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