The moment I drew the copy of Marilyn Sigman’s new “Entangled; People and Ecological Change in Alaska’s Kachemak Bay” from it’s University of Chicago Press envelope, I had a bit of a flashback. As a young man, my father and I made the annual summer journey with so many of the other north Oregon coast commercial fisherman to work in the salmon fishery in Bristol Bay – a mere hundred miles and change to the west of Kachemak.
Much like scents, flavors can have remarkable powers over our minds. Even a small taste of just the right flavor can, as Proust so eloquently described – at length – in his À la recherche du temps perdu, unlock a veritable treasure chest of memories. For myself, it’s the flavors from my childhood that seem […]
As regular readers of The Well-read Naturalist well know, it all began long ago with a curious young boy and an old library copy of the Herbert Spencer Zim’s “Fishes: A Guide to Fresh and Salt-water Species.” Therefore, whenever a new field guide to fish is published (which doesn’t happen all that often) I immediately take notice.
With the recent publication of the third edition of Carstensen, Armstrong, and O’Clair’s classic The Nature of Southeast Alaska; A Guide to Plants, Animals, and Habitats by Graphic Arts Books, readers of this freshly updated guide to the natural history of the area will not only have at their fingertips a wealth of new illustrations and maps […]