|
 Andrea
Barrett
Curious Naturalists, by
Niko Tinbergen
I don't remember the first time I read this strange
and lovely book, which was published not long after
I was born. Certainly I'd read it more than once by
early adolescence; Tinbergen's stories of his life as
an eager naturalist, fascinated at various times by
the habits of bee-killing digger wasps, eider ducks
and phalaropes, gulls and kittiwakes and bumblebees,
were a large part of what inspired me to study biology,
especially animal behavior (Tinbergen's specialty).
In particular, his descriptions of studying snow buntings
in East Greenland, among Inuit hunters, fed a passion
for the arctic I'd conceived as a girl.
Later, when it turned out that, after all, I wasn't
meant to be a professional naturalist, Tinbergen's book
reminded me that one can happily, fruitfully, observe
the world and its creatures without making a career
of it; still later it helped reignite my Tinbergen's
prose is lively, colloquial, personal, intensely knowledgeable
without ever being pedantic--for writing about natural
history and the lives of naturalists. In his wise last
chapter, he notes: "In the study of the ways in
which animals manage to do the things that are so obviously
useful to them, all failures are of great interest."
Useful advice for writers as well as budding naturalists.
- Andrea Barrett
|
