Bøger af Mary Taylor Young

The author's odyssey through the austere yet beautiful shortgrass prairie offers stories of connection to the land. Part nature lore, part history, part meditation, this narrative reveals an intricately woven landscape of wildlife, plants, and people. To look beyond the open space, to truly know a prairie and its secrets, the author learns to look inward, and to see with more than her eyes. She discovers places within herself that she never knew existed and finds that, despite the changing face of the plains, the prairie's lesson remains the same: As we learn to appreciate this subtle, hard-to-love land, we come to value ourselves.

"...nature writer and zoologist Mary Taylor Young tells the story of the growing effects of climate change on her land in the pine-covered foothills of southern Colorado. Climate change wasn't yet on the public radar when Young and her husband bought their piece of the wild in 1995. They built a cabin and set up a trail of bluebird nest boxes, and Mary began a nature journal of her observations, delighting in the ceaseless dramas, joys, and tragedies that are the fabric of life in the wild. But changes greater than the seasonal cycles of nature became evident over time: increasing drought, trees killed by plagues of beetles, wildfires, catastrophic weather, bears entering hibernation later and thinner, the decline of some familiar birds, and the appearance of new species. Their journal of sightings over twenty-five bluebird seasons, she realized, was a record of climate change happening, not in an Indonesian rainforest or on an Antarctic ice sheet but in their own natural neighborhood. Using the journal as a chronicle of change, Young tells a story echoed in everyone's lives and backyards. But it's not time to despair, she writes. It's time to act. Young sees hope in the human ability to overcome great obstacles, in the energy and determination of young people, and in nature's resilience, which the bluebirds show season after season."--Publisher.