Natural history and ethology, the science of animal behavior, have been interests of mine for a long time. That made it both an honor and a lot of fun for me to adapt David Barrie’s fascinating book Supernavigators into this version for young readers.
Illustrator Qu Lan and Tra Publishing outdid themselves, producing a book that is almost as beautiful as the many creatures in the natural world that it celebrates.
People also navigate through the world, and the book talks about how they do it. After all, we’re animals, too!
The wondrousness of the natural world inheres in even the smallest things. Two articles recently reminded me of this easy-to-forget truth. One was about sand, the other about bugs.
These “gems” are microscopically enlarged pieces of sand from Point Spencer, Alaska. As this Atlas Obscura article explains, the sand of this long, narrow spit in the Bering Sea is made up of a variety of minerals, including olivine and quartz. Point Spencer was once at the heart of Beringia, the land bridge that formerly linked Asia and North America.
And the bugs, you ask? This piece in The Guardian describes a high, narrow pass in the Pyrenees Mountains, between France and Spain. Each year, more than 17 million tiny insects migrate through this cleft in the mountains, which is about 30 yards (or meters) wide. Researchers say their flight looks like a flying carpet and gives off a low, penetrating hum. They hope that studying the phenomenon will help bring attention to the plight of insects, which are suffering alarming population crashes around the world. And as the insects go, so goes the rest of life on this planet. We all need that flying carpet.
