A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY8 start with W start with W
This newest addition to Iowa’s popular series of laminated guides—the twenty-eighth in the series—illustrates the thirty-eight species of warblers that occur in the Upper Midwest states of Minnesota, Illinois, Nebraska, Kansas, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin. For each species, artist Dana Gardner provides length, range, and habitat; he illustrates male, female, and immature birds where plumage varies; and he includes birds similar to warblers such as kinglets and vireos.
For all their brilliance, warblers can be hard to identify, particularly in the fall—the phrase “confusing fall warblers” was coined for a reason—and when they are in immature plumage. Quick-moving and often found in treetops, they can be challenging even in spring, and the drabber colors of the young birds of the season and of many fall adults can make identification difficult. The illustrations and descriptions in Warblers in Your Pocket will be a most welcome reference for bird watchers throughout the Midwest.
Waterfowl in Winter was first published in 1988. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
The emphasis in research on waterfowl has traditionally focused on breeding as opposed to migrant or wintering birds. Scientists have long been interested in courtship, nest sites, laying, and brood-rearing, and they have also been concerned about losses of eggs, young, nesting hens, and breeding habitats, especially as they have affected the goal of increasing populations. But lately there has been an upsurge of interest and research on the migratory and wintering phases, and this volume offers ample evidence of the knowledge gained.
The authors—105 waterfowl biologists—have contributed 47 chapters that range geographically from Alaska to northern South America, and from the Pacific Northwest to Nova Scotia and Florida. Their subjects include: distributional changes due to human influence; population trends and concerns over less common species; pairing and other behavior that occurs in the wintering areas and is vital to the success of the species; feeding ecology and body condition during winter; new habitats created by such activities as aquaculture and park development; losses of habitat due to development and drainage for alternate uses; lead poisoning and pollutants that are detrimental to waterfowl; habitat management for maintenance of successful populations now and in the future. Also presented are reports of workshop discussions outlining current issues and future research needs. Preparation of this volume was assisted by an editorial board comprising Bruce J. J. Batt, Robert H. Chabreck, Leigh H. Fredrickson, and Dennis G. Raveling.
Claudia McGehee brought the glory of the prairie to life in A Tallgrass Prairie Alphabet and explored the wonders of the woodlands in A Woodland Counting Book. Now this award-winning artist focuses on the birds of the United States, bringing children and their parents closer to the habitats and lives of birds from the Pacific coast to open rangeland to the cityscape of Manhattan.
McGehee introduces us to fourteen representative habitats, giving each its own double-page spread that features a signature bird. She devotes one page of each spread to depicting the bird in the full complexity of its complete habitat—at home in its environment with other animal companions—and the other page describes and illustrates its nesting, feeding, soaring, and paddling lifeways. Highlighting ideas for preserving and protecting each habitat and its inhabitants, McGehee also provides ways that children can make their own backyards safe havens for birdlife while they learn to enjoy the magic of birdwatching.
Claudia’s birds include bobolinks on the tallgrass prairie, common ravens in the Pacific rainforest, brown pelicans on barrier islands in the Gulf of Mexico, scarlet tanagers in the northwoods, red-cockaded woodpeckers in longleaf pine forests, greater roadrunners in the southwestern desert, and roseate spoonbills in red mangrove forests. Her energizing, engaging illustrations create worlds of vibrant color that ring with the calls and songs of birds across the panorama of American landscapes.
The first book to approach ecosystem services from an ornithological perspective, Why Birds Matter asks what economic value we can ascribe to those services, if any, and how this value should inform conservation. Chapters explore the role of birds in such important ecological dynamics as scavenging, nutrient cycling, food chains, and plant-animal interactions—all seen through the lens of human well-being—to show that quantifying avian ecosystem services is crucial when formulating contemporary conservation strategies. Both elucidating challenges and providing examples of specific ecosystem valuations and guidance for calculation, the contributors propose that in order to advance avian conservation, we need to appeal not only to hearts and minds, but also to wallets.
Why Don’t Jumbo Jets Flap Their Wings? offers a fascinating explanation of how nature and human engineers each arrived at powered flight. What emerges is a highly readable account of two very different approaches to solving the same fundamental problems of moving through the air, including lift, thrust, turning, and landing. The book traces the slow and deliberate evolutionary process of animal flight—in birds, bats, and insects—over millions of years and compares it to the directed efforts of human beings to create the aircraft over the course of a single century.
Among the many questions the book answers:
- Why are wings necessary for flight?
- How do different wings fly differently?
- When did flight evolve in animals?
- What vision, knowledge, and technology was needed before humans could learn to fly?
- Why are animals and aircrafts perfectly suited to the kind of flying they do?
David E. Alexander first describes the basic properties of wings before launching into the diverse challenges of flight and the concepts of flight aerodynamics and control to present an integrated view that shows both why birds have historically had little influence on aeronautical engineering and exciting new areas of technology where engineers are successfully borrowing ideas from animals.
The Missouri River Basin is home to thousands of bird species that migrate across the Great Plains of North America each year, marking the seasonal cycle and filling the air with their song. In time immemorial, Native inhabitants of this vast region established alliances with birds that helped them to connect with the gods, to learn the workings of nature, and to live well.
This book integrates published and archival sources covering archaeology, ethnohistory, historical ethnography, folklore, and interviews with elders from the Blackfoot, Assiniboine, Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, and Crow communities to explore how relationships between people and birds are situated in contemporary practice, and what has fostered its cultural persistence. Native principles of ecological and cosmological knowledge are brought into focus to highlight specific beliefs, practices, and concerns associated with individual bird species, bird parts, bird objects, the natural and cultural landscapes that birds and people cohabit, and the future of this ancient alliance.
Detailed descriptions critical to ethnohistorians and ethnobiologists are accompanied by thirty-four color images. A unique contribution, The Winged expands our understanding of sets of interrelated dependencies or entanglements between bird and human agents, and it steps beyond traditional scientific and anthropological distinctions between humans and animals to reveal the intricate and eminently social character of these interactions.
A century ago, many people had given up on the wood duck, dooming it to extinction along with the passenger pigeon and Carolina parakeet. Today, it’s one of the most familiar and most harvested ducks in the eastern half of the country, and one of America’s great conservation success stories.
In With Wings Extended, Minnesota conservationist Greg Hoch introduces readers to a duck they probably recognize but may not know well. This book shows how almost anyone can get involved in conservation and do something for wildlife beyond writing checks to conservation organizations. Hoch illustrates the complexities of wildlife and habitat management that landowners as well as state and federal wildlife agencies deal with on a daily basis, and takes readers through the life stages of what is largely considered the most beautiful duck in the world. In this fascinating and practical read, Hoch blends the historical literature about the species with modern science, and also shows how our views of conservation have changed over the last century.
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