Eric Wagner is a staff writer with the Puget Sound Institute at University of Washington, Tacoma. He is author of After the Blast: The Ecological Recovery of Mount St. Helens and Penguins in the Desert, and wrote the text for Once and Future River: Reclaiming the Duwamish.
His new book is Seabirds as Sentinels: Auklets, Puffins, Shearwaters, and the View from Destruction Island.
At Lit Hub Wagner tagged six essential books about birds, including:
Maria Mudd Ruth, The Bird with Flaming Red Feet: Seasons with an Uncommonly Common SeabirdRead about the other books on the list at Lit Hub.
The pigeon guillemot is in many ways everything the rhinoceros auklet is not—loud, visually dramatic, gregarious, conspicuous, with a willingness to come to land during the day. In The Bird with Flaming Red Feet, Maria joins a citizen science group devoted to their study and follows the birds for years. Documenting her and her fellow volunteers’ attentions, the book is an ode to the kind of careful, patient natural history that contemporary science practiced at its increasingly rapid pace does not encourage as much anymore.
--Marshal Zeringue
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