Although my post is quite late in the day, I actually took this picture very early this morning.  I got to campus shortly after 9 (alright, very early for me ) and everything was beautiful, sparkly and coated in snow.  I’ve been thinking about trying to get a nice silhouette of these plants for a while and as soon as I saw how pretty the campus was, I knew this was the day.  I wasn’t a huge fan of the lens flare I ended up with, but the pictures without just didn’t do justice to the snow on the plants.

The book was well-written with lots of fun facts about each of the 100 most common Iowa birds.  I mostly skimmed the description of each bird, just because 100 birds is a lot to get through! Plus, I knew what I really wanted right now was to find when I could find each bird in Iowa (shown on a handy map on each page) and which birds I could expect to attract to a feeder (indicated by an icon at the top of each page).   I appreciated how easy it was to find this information and enjoyed reading the summaries provided for each bird.

Although I got this book mostly to help me attract birds to my balcony, I do think it could be a lot of fun to try a little bird-watching at other locations.  As a complete novice birder, I wish that the book had included more specific ranges for each bird, instead of just describing the sort of habitat where you might find them.  I expect I can find most of this information online though at bird-tracking sites like eBird.  The book did provide some links, mostly up-to-date, to birding resources online and I’ve included some of them here:

• a page with links to many Iowa birding resources, including a checklist for tracking birds you’ve seen
• a list of the Iowa chapters of the Audubon society
• a local wildlife preserve with birding opportunities
• the great bird count website, hosts a bird count once a year
• an article on the Great Backyard Bird Count by The Creative Cat
• a year round bird tracking site, keeps a list of birds you’ve sighted

Summary

Iowa Bird Watching – 4 stars – a solid introductory book with good pictures and easily accessible information, but didn’t really pull me in.

One wonderful thing about reading non-fiction is that you nearly always learn something interesting.  Here are a handful of the fun/interesting things I’ve learned recently:

• Golf-course landscapers are very highly at risk for cancer because of the pesticides they use.  For the rest of us, the take away is don’t use pesticides and don’t walk all over the house in your shoes, especially if you have small children! - from A Spring Without Bees
• There are more darkly colored cats in the city than in less urban areas, even though humans tend to select for lighter colors.  This could be because the cats people adopt are often neutered/spayed or because cities provide areas where darker coloring serves as camouflage. - From The Character of Cats
• There are five different categories of cheese: fresh, soft-ripened, semi-hard, hard, and blue.  Also, people actually order bacteria online in order to make cheese.  Who knew! – From The Joy of Cheesemaking
• And most recently, the birds that have started visiting my balcony are House Sparrows.   - From my current read, Iowa Bird Watching.
• Given that these birds have started showing up, I decided to prioritize getting some bird feeders out over planning a container garden for in the spring.  Although I’ve also recently learned that having sheltering plants available for birds will help convince them to visit – From Welcoming Wildlife to the Garden

The first book I read was The Complete Cat’s Meow: Everything You Need to Know About Caring For Your Cat and it was exactly what I expected from a book about owning a cat.  It was clearly written, had cute cat pictures, and covered the material I guessed it would cover.  This included tips for picking out a cat and introducing it to your home; advice on your cat’s diet and health care; and suggestions for dealing with problems that might arise, such as your cat clawing your furniture or not using the litter box.  Although useful, it was not especially entertaining.

Another similar book I read was The Complete Guide to Understanding and Caring for Your Cat.  Although this book covered the same material, I liked it much better.  There were a lot of fun anecdotes about cats the author had helped adjust to changes in their human’s lives or to settle in to a new home.  Much of the book was presented in question and answer format, which I thought made the book flow slightly less well than it might have, but there were complete paragraphs in each section containing a lot of the same information.  There was quite a lot of product placement, which was a little off-putting as it made me wonder about the author’s motives, but was also much more helpful than more general advice.  The author does frequently recommend tranquilizers for stressed cats.  Personally I wouldn’t be comfortable trying this with my cat, but she seems to have had some success with it.  She also always emphasizes that the tranquilizers are a temporary treatment for that cat’s stress, only used when necessary and until a solution to the cause of their stress can be found.  Finally, the main reason I would recommend this book is because it contains some of the best advice I’ve ever seen on introducing a cat to a new person, new pet, or previous pet.  The advice for figuring out what is at the root of a cat’s misbehavior and dealing with different possible stressors was also superb.

The two worst books I read were a cartoon guide called Totally Fun Things to Do With Your Cat and Cat Speak, a book about communicating with your cat.  The cartoon guide just offered a lot of really bad advice, like suggesting you greet a cat by putting your face next to the cat’s face.  If I tried that with my cat, I would consider myself extremely lucky if she didn’t take a swipe at me.  She seems to find me putting my face close enough to bite her threatening and would much rather have a hand slowly extended for her to smell.  The book also suggested that some cats might like water, without adequately stressing that some cats might equally well hate it.  Although these flaws might be ok in a book meant for adults, who could recognize how bad some of the ideas are, in a cartoon guide meant for children I think such advice could have unfortunate consequences.

Cat Speak had all the worst qualities of a really bad self-help book, presenting advice that was either common sense dressed up in pseudo-science or which sounded good, but wasn’t.  The author begins by talking about how famous he is for his work with dogs, but he’s really always loved cats too (honest!).  The self-aggrandizement was pretty annoying and read more like an ad than a passage by a cat lover.  Things only got worse from there, starting with some gimmicky lists such as “The Seven Instinctive Feline Behaviors” and the “Six Special Feline Abilities and Idiosyncrasies”.  The advice for understanding your cats mood was mostly of the obvious type – at least, no one in my family has ever had trouble telling when our cat is angry, sad, or hungry without someone to explain what different ear angles mean.  If a cat wants you to understand how it’s feeling, they’re pretty good at letting you know.  Where the book really went wrong was when it tried to give scientific explanations for cat behavior.  One mistake they made is referring to cats as nocturnal, when they are actually crepuscular (awake at dawn and dusk).  While this might seem nit-picky and unimportant, as someone about to adopt a cat it would be nice to know that they might (like my cat Maggie) be really wild as you’re going to bed and want lots of attention in the morning – but not all night.  In a lot of cases, I just felt like the author was trying to do too much in too little space.  He went into just enough detail to get it wrong and not enough detail to explain cat behavior accurately.

Finally, these last two books are the best books I read and I can’t recommend them enough.  First, The Cat Whisperer, which I expected to be as gimmicky as Cat Speak, really pleasantly surprised me.  The author does an incredible job of describing a cat’s senses and how cats physically perceive the world.  She also shares a lot of fun facts about cats.  For instance, cats can stand much warmer temperatures than humans.  Humans start avoiding heat at 115F while cats aren’t bothered until 126F.  Apparently, the only parts of a cats body which are sensitive to heat are it’s nose and upperlip, which it uses as a kitten to locate it’s mother before it’s eyes are open.  She also talks a lot about why cats behave the way the do and gives some very good advice for dealing with nearly any behavior problem you might encounter.

The other great book I read was The Character of Cats: The Origins, Intelligence, Behavior, and Stratagems of Felis silvestris catus.  As the subtitle suggests, this book took the most scientific approach of any of the books.  This might indicate how geeky I am, but I loved learning about cats’ behavior this way.  The author starts by talking a little about how cats evolved and how interesting it is that (unlike dogs, horses, and many other domesticated animals) cats can still breed with their wild counterpart.  It is also true that wild cats can survive without us, much better than wolves or the nearly extinct ancestors of today’s horses.  You can really feel the author’s admiration and love of cats he discusses the implication of these facts: first, that cats choose to live with us even though they could survive without us and second that they have done so without changing to please us.  He also presents a lot of really cool behavioral studies, showing that cats learn by observing other cats; that cats are intelligent, but are most intelligent at tests which make sense with their natural behavior; and showing that cats build mental maps with themselves at the center (not landmark based) – among other interesting tidbits.  Together with The Cat Whisperer‘s description of a cat’s sensory input, this description of the way cats think gave me a much better appreciation of my cat.  I would highly recommend these books together to anyone who wants a really thorough understanding of how how their cat senses and thinks about the world around them.

Books I would recommend for a new cat owner or prospective cat owner:

The Complete Guide to Understanding and Caring for Your Cat - 4 stars – contains all the information you need, well written and entertaining

The Complete Cat’s Meow - 3 stars – also contains all the information you need, but in a less interesting format

Books I would recommend to someone who wants to understand their cat better:

The Cat Whisperer - 4 stars – a great introduction to the way cats sense the world, include good explanations of cat behavior and helpful advice for dealing with nearly any behavior problem you can imagine

The Character of Cats  – 5 stars – really interesting, scientific approach to understanding the way cats think and why the behave the way they do

Books I would recommend avoiding:

Totally Fun Things to Do With Your Cat - 1 star – cartoon guide giving bad advice in a book intended for children who won’t know any better

Cat Speak -1 star – gimmicky, common sense dressed up in pseudo-science and incorrect advice that sounds just good enough it might fool you

Fortunately, I also have an awesome picture of my cat Maggie to share or I might feel pretty sad about my picture selection this week!  She thought I was paying way too much attention to the shower curtain and wanted to play, so I decided to try to take pictures of her while playing with her. Easier said than done! First, she would grab the yarn and sit up and look fierce – until the moment I got my camera oriented for a portrait shot, when she would roll on her back and look adorable and very horizontal.  She also did her absolute best to look at the string (and therefore the camera) for the minimum amount of time possible while still holding the string.  I swear, she was laughing on the inside.  In fact, the one non-motion blurred face shot I managed to get is the one you see here, and I’m pretty sure she’s singularly unimpressed with my picture taking speed.  If she could talk, I think she’d tell me that if I was trying to catch mice, I would be utterly hopeless

My first thought when I read the question was “Romances?  I don’t read romances!” but that thought was quickly followed by the realization that there are definitely books I’ve ended up loving for the romance.  I haven’t read a book where the romance really jumped out at me in a while, but mentally browsing books I’ve read in the past one book really stood out to me.  It’s been a while, so I wish I had this book on hand to remind myself why it left such an impression on me, but I vividly remember loving The Silver Kiss by Annette Curtis Klause.  I think I might even have cried.  Although I don’t remember all the details, I do remember this being a very moving book and might have to re-read it now.

In addition to answering the Monday Musing question, I’d also like to announce a few more challenges I found for 2012 (I’m a little slow, I know!) which fit particularly well with the reading I’ve been enjoying this year.  Reading through the Dewey Decimal system has made me really want to expand the sorts of books I read.  At first, I’d just wander through the non-fiction section and want to read everything, but now it’s gotten to where I wander the whole library feeling that way!  So, to indulge my desire to sample new genres, I will be participating in the Around the Stack in How Many Ways Challenge at the Palin-esque level, which means I’ll be trying to read books from 20+ genres.  For this to be possible, you’ll notice that the host Dog Ear Discus has defined genres pretty narrowly. I will also be completing the similar Eclectic Reader Challenge hosted by Book’d Out.

And last but not least, I will be starting the Book To Movie Challenge hosted by Para Junkee, because I enjoyed reading and than watching Percy Jackson so much.  I think it will be  a lot of fun to see how well (or not) different books are made into movies.  Feel free to join me!

Non-Project Non-Fiction

After reading about ways to attract wildlife to the garden earlier in the week, I was ready to dive into a book about an actual conservation project - Nature’s Second Chance by Steven Apfelbaum.  In this book, Apfelbaum chronicles his thirty years working to restore the pre-farming ecosystem at Stone Prairie Farm in Wisconsin.  As the introduction points out, this isn’t a book about homesteading but does include a lot of the same elements.  In particular, the author learns about the wood on his property used for the construction of his house and lives a very green, self-sufficient life style with his family constructing some of their own furniture, using solar power, and canning many of the fruits and vegetables they grow.

Despite my excitement to start the book, I had a hard time getting into it.  As Julie and Lanna at Bloggers Heart Books recently discussed, sometimes what makes or breaks a book is how it fits into your life at the time you read it.   In this case, I do think there’s a possibility my impression of the book suffered because I was so tired when I started it.  However, even looking back at the book, I feel as though the beginning was too intellectual in a clinically detached sort of way.  The forward suggested that the book was going to be full of the author’s passion for the environment and his restoration project, but the beginning was an almost philosophical analysis of human interactions with nature.  There were also three or four typos in the first 25 pages, which bothered me more than I would have guessed.

Fortunately, by the second section of the book, the author began to tell more personal stories about his experience with the farm and his family.  The typo problem disappeared and the much-anticipated enthusiasm began to shine through in the author’s tone.  By the end, the author was passionately describing his vision for many linked conservation areas across the United States, with individuals banding together to live in a more sustainable manner.  Although his vision was somewhat utopian, he presented compelling financial reasons for preserving land as prairie, most especially for its use in trapping water and preventing floods, as well as more emotional appeals.

In addition to engaging personal stories, the book included some very interesting details about the restoration process and the author’s interactions with his land.  I thought it was really cool that he was able to determine the source of the wood used to build his house by taking core samples of the beams and nearby trees.  I also thought the details the author glossed over, specifically the hardship he endured and the amount of time it took to complete the restoration, gave some insight into his character.  The way he just dropped in details (“So nine years later, when I met my partner…” or “when my partner and her son decided they didn’t like freezing by a wood burning stove in a poorly insulated house…”) made his unthinking endurance very clear.

With this book, I have again reached the happy point where I feel as though I’m really becoming engaged in a topic.  First, A Spring Without Bees talked about the many dangers of pesticides, not only to our bee dependent crops but to our health. Then reading Welcoming Wildlife to the Garden made me excited to plant a garden with lots of native plants in order to support local wildlife.  And finally this book gave me some insight into the challenges native plants and animals face, both from human degradation of their habitat and from invasive species.  It’s all made me that much more excited to start my balcony garden and eventually have a yard where I can do even more.

Current Fiction Readings

Although I didn’t get to read any non-fiction this week, I’m excited to have finally gotten Cinder from the library today.  Apparently the hype at my local library was less than that in the blogosphere, as I was only third in line, but I still feel like I’ve been waiting for ages!  I’ve also checked out the third and fourth books in the Vampire Academy series and am eagerly waiting for the first and second to come in as well.  I can’t wait to watch the TV series, but I think I want to have read at least the original quartet first.

Summary

Nature’s Second Chance - 3 stars – Although I may be penalizing the book for my exhaustion, I really couldn’t get into it at the beginning.  The book did improve as it went on, with the author’s passion for his work becoming more obvious and the story becoming more personal.  However, the book continued to be wordy and the initial struggle to begin was unpleasant enough that I would say I only liked it.

Unfortunately, this was another week when I didn’t have enough time to get out and take a new picture, but I’ve decided not to be too hard on myself as long as I’m doing something each week toward getting better at photography.  And this week, not only did I touch up the lovely photo above, I also participated in the Ames Camera Club abstract competition.  It was very informal, with no real winners selected, but the judge did pick 8 of the 30-ish pictures as good examples of abstracts, including one of mine (posted here).  Although we don’t always interact that much at camera club (when there are speakers, for example), last night was a lot of fun and everyone was really supportive of everyone else’s efforts.

I decided to work on this picture this week because I’ve had so much fun with taking abstract photos for the competition.  I think I’d like to try to keep looking for interesting shapes like this to photograph.  This particular picture is part of a wooden walkway at the top of the mountain containing the Mammoth Caves, near Hallstatt, Austria.  I had a great time visiting Europe with friends and am having fun attempting to sort through the hundreds of pictures we took too!

The book was broken into three main parts: the main text, of course, explaining how to set up your garden and attract specific animals; sidebars, with interesting anecdotes from bird, butterfly, and bug watchers; and instructions for projects, such as making your own feeders and bird houses.  There were also a lot of gorgeous pictures and sketches mixed in with the text, as well as helpful-looking diagrams with the projects.  Most of the projects would require a workbench, a lot of tools, and a lot of garden space, so they would probably be best for someone living in a house rather than an apartment.  But there was one simple-looking project for making a hanging moss basket for flowers which other apartment owners might find useful.

I would recommend this book to anyone trying to start a garden in hopes of observing wildlife in their backyard, but with the caveat that this book doesn’t include everything you need to know.  The scope of the book is very broad, covering nearly every animal imaginable, and suggests using mostly local plants while planning for local wildlife.  At the least, identifying what local plants and wildlife are will probably require another book or some internet-searching.  However, the book is a great overview of this way of thinking when designing a garden.  In fact, it includes one really great chapter on the process of planning your garden and I would recommend that chapter even to someone with little interest in wildlife.  I think it would make the chances of you digging up your garden and then realizing you want to change things much slimmer.  As someone who doesn’t always think things all the way though, I appreciate that kind of help!  I wouldn’t suggest reading the book cover-to-cover as I did; just focus on the sections relevant to the animals you’re interested in and the general chapters about planning and about balcony gardens or landscaping, depending on your location.

Although I was tempted to give this book five stars after reading my own glowing review, I really do think it’s only a four star book for two reasons.  First, my enjoyment level just wasn’t high enough to justify a five.  Not all of the book was relevant to me and even the relevant parts sometimes felt a little too dry and instructional.  And second of all, there really will be a lot of research required to actually do anything with the material in the book.  In fact, I think in the near future I will be reading books about local wildlife and container gardening in order to work on my project.  That said, the book does do a great job given the material the authors decided to cover, but I think I would have preferred a book which focused on fewer animals or on one specific region.

Summary

Welcoming Wildlife to the Garden - 4 stars – A great overview of wildlife-friendly gardening practices, with lots of fun pictures and anecdotes, but spreads itself a little thin with all the material it tries to cover.

In addition to fun facts about bees, the book focused on a discussion of possible causes of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), a phenomenon where most bees in a hive fly away and never return, leaving the few remaining bees to die.  CCD is also distinguishable from many bee illnesses and parasites by the way other insects avoid the abandoned hives.  This intriguing premise gave the book a little of the feel of a mystery novel and I liked the way the author systematically eliminated possible causes.  It was, however, immediately clear that the author had an anti-pesticide agenda and sure enough the conclusion was that the most likely culprit was the insecticide, IMD.  Initially the book also seemed very over-dramatic (“Are the bees trying to tell us something? Could CCD be the warning sign of a much larger crisis looming directly ahead?  Might humankind someday suffer from “Civilization Collapse Disorder?”) but it was also interesting right from the beginning, starting with the fun fact that the Haagen-Dazs ice-cream company claims 40% of their flavors depend on bees.

As I got further into the book, it turned out to be less melodramatic than I thought at first, given that 1/3 of agricultural crops depend on bees (although the author does usually invoke drought and/or other national disasters  in conjunction with bees in his more “we’re all gonna die without bees!” moments).  In fact, I found myself increasingly horrified by the evidence against IMD ignored first by French politicians and then by the EPA in the US, who ignored not only the evidence but the previous identical experience in France!  The EPA even continued to give IMD “temporary emergency” permits, allowing it to bypass many safety tests, and had employee whistle-blowing not have prevented it, the EPA was ready to fund testing of these pesticides on children, which I found pretty terrifying.

Some research into the current status of IMD indicated that it is still in use in the US, although as far as I can tell it is now allowed through more regular channels.  The EPA website even has a link the national pesticide information center and their page on IMD includes its’ suspected link to CCD.  Although they do downplay the connection, they also link to sources on both sides of the issue, including the American Beekeeping Federation.  Additionally, the EPA website now promotes the integrated pest management program recommended by the author, in which consumers, bee-keepers, and landscapers are urged to use natural predators in place of pesticides when possible.

I should emphasize that I am convinced that IMD causes CCD based on the evidence presented here, which may not be a representative sample.  The author only rarely acknowledges that IMD may not be the cause and even more rarely cites any scientist who disagrees with his theory if he can’t dismiss them as biased by associations with chemical companies.  Despite some reservations due to the author’s perceptible bias, I am completely convinced that he is right about the taking prudent precautions due to “The Law of Unintended Consequences” (his caps).  There is certainly sufficient evidence that IMD could be the cause of CCD and the consequences would be serious enough that it makes sense to switch to alternative pest controls.  These alternatives could include the many helpful suggestions the author gives for controlling bee-killing pests organically, in addition to his helpful advice for home owners on organic lawn care.

Summary

A Spring Without Bees - 5 stars – Informative, well-written, engrossing, and includes actionable steps for avoiding dangerous pesticides in your day-to-day life.