How the Earthquake Bird Got Its Name and Other Tales of an Unbalanced Nature. H. H. Shugart. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2004. 240 pp., illus. $27.50 (ISBN 030010457X cloth).
If a book can't be judged by its cover, neither should its title, or even its table of contents, be expected to accurately portray its contents. Clever chapter titles such as “The Rat that Held Time in Its Nest” and “The Wolf that Was Woman's Best Friend” suggest a popular and somewhat lightweight recounting of animal tales. However, the recent book by Hank Shugart, W. W. Corcoran Professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, is much more than a collection of stories and anecdotes about natural history. It is an information-packed, well-referenced, and wide-ranging book that covers the gamut of landscape ecology from fundamental principles to complex human–nature interactions.
The titles follow from Shugart's formula of beginning each chapter with an excerpt of historical narrative, from Pliny the Elder (AD 81) to ornithologist George Lowery (1955), followed by several pages of discussion about the species of interest. The examples serve to introduce the topic of the chapter. A discussion of pack rats and their middens introduces paleoecology and climate change. The earthquake bird—the now extinct Bachman's warbler, whose nickname refers to its former abundance in the tangles and downed trees that resulted from 19th-century earthquakes in the swamplands of the southeastern United States—naturally leads to a discussion of disturbances. And so it goes.
The format works well once the reader understands what the book is about. I admit to some frustration when the first chapter, which was ostensibly about the ivory-billed woodpecker (“The Big Woodpecker that Was Too Picky”), mentioned the woodpecker on only 6 of 23 pages. The chapter introduces landscape ecology, covering gap dynamics, interspecific relationships among trees, and nearly everything in between those topics. The seven figures (including a highly theoretical flow diagram illustrating “the complex relationships among trees of four simple ecological roles”), 27 footnotes, and one table (but also one poem) in the first chapter are probably enough to scare off the lay reader who picks up the book expecting something much lighter.
Shugart has a lot to offer readers who persevere. He is a polyglot who weaves information from many fields into a compelling presentation. Shugart offers ecological facts and theories, served up with a discussion of the societal influences of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and a smorgasbord of arcane facts—for example, rabbit was a prominent part of the menu at the installation of the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1443 (a relevant tidbit, because it shows the abundance of this introduced species in Britain).
A number of examples refer to Australia, where Shugart has spent part of his career. Perhaps the most interesting is the complex story of the tiny Leadbeater's possum, a species once thought extinct and found only in forests of old-growth mountain ash (Eucalyptus regnans, the world's tallest flowering plant, at over 100 meters tall). The possums nest in stumps and snags of trees killed by catastrophic wildfires. Fires of this magnitude are very infrequent, with the last ones—the Black Friday fires—having occurred in 1939. The possums are facing a crisis because their current nesting trees are decaying, and the regrowth trees generated by the 1939 fire will not be mature enough for nesting until 2140. Complicating this population bottleneck are forest practices that do not allow trees to reach sufficient age for possum nesting, in addition to policies to prevent catastrophic forest fires.
As is almost inevitable in this “world of wounds” that passes for nature at the beginning of the third millennium, there is a strong conservation message. Three of the nine focal species in the parables that begin the chapters are extinct (great auks, Bachman's warblers, and New Zealand moas), and a fourth, the ivory-billed woodpecker, was assumed by Shugart and others to be extinct until its remarkable rediscovery earlier this year (Fitzpatrick et al. 2005). There is also discussion of the extinct passenger pigeon—the most abundant land bird in the world as recently as two centuries ago—in the chapter about the red-billed quelea of Africa (“The Most Common Bird on Earth”).
It is instructive to reexamine the chapter involving the ivory-billed woodpecker now that we know that the presumption of its extinction was mistaken. Shugart's premise is that the woodpecker was “too picky”: its specialized feeding habits, utilizing a “rare element” of the forest, require extensive acres of floodplain forest. These massive woodpeckers eat grubs found underneath the bark that is scaled off from large, newly dead old-growth trees. The replacement of these trees requires sufficient time for the forest to regenerate, and to sustain the woodpecker there must be an area that provides enough trees in this condition.
Shugart summarizes,“The sad demise of the ivory-billed woodpecker reveals much about the dynamics of natural vegetation. From the forest in which it occurred, the bird appears to have required a short-lived but slowly generated portion of the gap replacement cycle. Its feeding habits required large, standing-dead trees with loose bark and insects underneath, a condition that is not always generated in the cyclic change in a forest; some trees, because of wind and other factors, fall over while still alive” (p. 22).
He continues,“The woodpecker ‘used up’ its scant resource rapidly because of its habit of only removing the loose bark of the trees to search for insects. A large tract of mature forests would be required to supply enough forest mosaic elements to satisfy the bird's needs. The clearing for agriculture of the floodplain forests of the U.S. South spelled trouble for a large animal that required a significant amount of mature forest to meet its highly specialized feeding requirements” (pp. 22–23).
This description of the species' requirements and the conditions necessary to fill those requirements is accurate. Happily, despite the clearing of the flood-plain forests, enough forest has remained for this “ghost with wings” to persist, out of human sight, for 60 years. Having survived into the 21st century, the woodpecker faces a regenerating forest, thanks to the foresight of conservationists and hunters, that offers hope for its continued, albeit tenuous existence. An understanding of the principles of landscape ecology elucidated in this book has allowed The Nature Conservancy, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and others to purchase and protect nearly half of the 500,000-acre “big woods” of eastern Arkansas, and allow natural regeneration to restore that forest, to meet the current needs of at least a small number of big woodpeckers. For this species and others to continue to exist, however, calls for even more understanding and application of ecological principles.
Ecological principles involve more than vegetation change and wildlife-habitat requirements. The next intellectual frontier is the complexity of human–nature interactions. This is addressed in several chapters, but mostly in demonstrating effects of human habitation (principally through disturbance, introduced species, and climate change). The final chapter, “Planetary Stewardship,” documents people's ability to change entire vegetation regimes, but offers little in the way of solutions. Nonetheless, an understanding of how landscapes change and how humans have been a part of these changes for millennia is a key precursor to conservation.
The intended audience for the book is not obvious to me. Presumably the book was written to have some appeal to an educated lay reader. However, despite the parables and many examples and interesting anecdotes, I'm afraid that the content may be out of reach of anyone who has not taken an ecology course. It appears that many of the chapters are derived from Shugart's own teaching experience. The book would be ideal for a graduate seminar or even as supplemental reading in a graduate course in advanced or landscape ecology. It is certainly also a useful refresher for this reader with a two-decades-old degree in ecology who is no longer engaged in research. It should serve equally well for many others with some background in ecology and a bit of patience.
