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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.
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| 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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The example of the packrat and nine other birds and animals are used by Shugart as introductions to various problems of ecology such as island biogeography, landscape mosaics, and niche theory in this collection of essays. The first five essays concentrate on the natural processes that cause various changes in nature, while the last three describe how man can bring about other types of change. The key word here is "change"—Shugart definitely wants his readers to discard notions of a balanced and consistent nature and show that "[c]hange is an essential part of nature" (p. 4). |
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But Shugart wishes for more than to simply tell stories. He wants to show that human actions do not result in a single predictable effect on our environment but that through ecosystem interaction our changes multiply again and again. In the last essay, aptly called "Planetary Stewardship," Shugart challenges all of us to learn more about what consequences our actions will have. |
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Environmental, biological, and ecological history are undoubtedly subjects well suited for the essay format and one needs to go no further than Stephen Jay Gould to see various examples of this. But since the essay usually means a less formal type of writing and since Shugart has chosen Kiplingean sounding titles for his writings, like "The Rat That Hid Time in Its Nest," the reader might get a wrong first impression of this book. |
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Especially in the first two essays, where Shugart explains how the ecological theories of forest mosaics and niche were developed during the twentieth century, the actual contents, interesting and informative as they are, do not match the literary titles and introductions. |
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Nonetheless, apart from this objection the book is well written and informative with thorough notes. It is also nicely illustrated, with reprints primarily from Audubon of the animals portrayed (a handsome illustration of Bachman's Warbler is on the cover) as well as diagrams and tables describing the scientific problem in question. A reader finishing How the Earthquake Bird... will be a great deal more knowledgeable about various problems of ecological history and hopefully also infused with a desire to know more about our ecological future. |
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Sofia Åkerberg is a biologist and a historian of science and ideas by training and is currently located at the Department of Animal Ecology at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Umeå. She is working on an interdisciplinary project concerning the status of the Swedish moose population and moose hunting during the twentieth century. |
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