Scott Weidensaul

Scott Weidensaul (born 1959) is a Pennsylvania-based naturalist and author.

Scott Weidensaul in 2012

Quotes

Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere With Migratory Birds (1999)

All quotes from the hardcover first edition, published by North Point Press, ISBN 0-86547-543-1
Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize

• —A Manx shearwater, a small, stocky seabird resembling a gull, was taken from its nest burrow on Skokholm, off Wales, and moved to Boston. It completed the trip home in just twelve days—one day faster than the airmail letter sent from the United States confirming the bird’s release.
  • Chapter 3, “The Way South” (p. 66)

• Birds are metabolic dynamos, requiring food at regular intervals and in significant amounts; few old sayings are as completely false as to claim that a finicky person “eats like like a bird.” If I ate, by proportion, the same amount as a chickadee, I would have to consume about fifty pounds of camarones every day, and even raptors, with their somewhat slower metabolism, must eat about 10 percent of their weight to stay alive.
  • Chapter 5, “Rivers of Hawks” (p. 112)

• Mexico affords legal protection to raptors, but it is a paper law only, poorly enforced and widely ignored in the field.
  • Chapter 5, “Rivers of Hawks” (p. 120)

• Of course, for environmental havoc, no organism can quite compare to humans.
  • Chapter 10, “Uneasy Neighbors” (p. 238)

• Scientists have called the arc of maritime live oak and pine that once rimmed the Gulf from east Texas to west Florida the most important migratory stopover area in North America, but it has been fractured into pathetic slivers—consumed by vacation home developments, grazing cattle, strip malls, and, most recently, even an explosion of casino construction. Further inland, the rich, diverse forests of longleaf pine and hardwoods that once supplied the birds with food before the next leg of their journey north or being clear-cut, the trees being ground into wood pulp by portable “chipping mills.” Elsewhere, the land is replanted with a sterile monoculture of fast-growing junk pine that offers little in the way of sustenance to a weary migrant.
  • Chapter 11, “The Gulf Express” (p. 253)

• You won’t find the cerulean warbler on the federal Endangered Species list; it is not so far gone as to rate that kind of last-gasp governmental life support, which is usually withheld until it is too late to do much good.
  • Chapter 11, “The Gulf Express” (p. 257)

• It is a prairie’s gentle deceit that you think you see everything there is in a single, sweeping glance, when in fact you see very little at all, even if you spend a lifetime looking.
  • Chapter 12, “Heartland” (p. 287)

• Some of these observations of “prairie pigeons” were made incidental to blasting them out of the sky; curlews, golden-plovers, godwits, and other shorebirds were treated much as passenger pigeons back East had been, with no-holds-barred slaughter. There are a number of accounts of gunners filling wagon beds with heaps of dead birds—then dumping the birds out to rot and filling the wagons all over again because the shooting was too good to stop.
  • Chapter 12, “Heartland” (p. 293)

• Stone makes a statement as true today as it was then, the reason why conservationists can never let down their guard: “As one menace is disposed of, another seems inevitably to develop.”
  • Chapter 13, “Hopscotch” (p. 321)

• To a layperson, this ebb and flow of scientific opinion, the flipflop of theory over time, the occasionally fierce and public disagreements between viewpoints, is as mystifying as it is frustrating… This isn’t a sign of science’s weakness, though, but rather its strength, always testing assumptions, making challenges, drawing new conclusions based on the latest evidence. It may err too far in one direction, then too far in the other, correcting as it goes, but every step eventually brings us all a little closer to the truth.
  • Chapter 14, “Catching the Wave” (p. 343; ellipsis represents the elision of two examples)

• Natural systems are like those hollow Russian dolls, layer nested within layer within layer, always hiding a new riddle beneath the last one. Figuring out how they work as a herculean task, one with which humans have been grappling for a relatively short time. If you want clear-cut problems and need solutions, try geometry. This is ecology and it doesn’t get any more complex and messier than this. But we’re learning.
  • Chapter 14, “Catching the Wave” (p. 344)

• Because we humans don’t notice changes that take place slowly, incrementally, we tend to underestimate their cumulative effects, even within the span of one or two lifetimes.
  • Chapter 15, “Trouble in the Woods” (p. 354)