Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest Part 22

GRINNELL, GEORGE BIRD. Wolves and Wolf Nature, in _Trail and Camp-Fire_, New York, 1897. This long chapter is richer in facts about the coyote than anything published prior to _The Voice of the Coyote_, which borrows from it extensively.

LOFBERG, LILA, and MALCOLMSON, DAVID. _Sierra Outpost_, Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New York, 1941. An extraordinary detailment of the friends.h.i.+p between two people, isolated by snow high in the California Sierras, and three coyotes. Written with fine sympathy, minute in observations.

MATHEWS, JOHN JOSEPH. _Talking to the Moon_, University of Chicago Press, 1945. A wise and spiritual interpretation of the black-jack country of eastern Oklahoma, close to the Osages, in which John Joseph Mathews lives. Not primarily about coyotes, the book illuminates them more than numerous books on particular animals illuminate their subjects.

MURIE, ADOLPH. _Ecology of the Coyote in the Yellowstone_, United States Government Printing Office, Was.h.i.+ngton, D. C., 1940. An example of strict science informed by civilized humanity. _The Wolves of Mount McKinley_, United States Government Printing Of ice, Was.h.i.+ngton, D. C., 1944. Murie's combination of prolonged patience, science, and sympathy behind the observations has never been common. His ecological point of view is steady. Highly interesting reading.

YOUNG, STANLEY PAUL (with Edward A. Goldman). _The Wolves of North America_, American Wildlife Inst.i.tute, Was.h.i.+ngton, D. C., 1944. Full information, full bibliography, without narrative power. _Sketches of American Wildlife_, Monumental Press, Baltimore, 1946. This slight book contains pleasant chapters on the Puma, Wolf, Coyote, Antelope and other animals characteristic of the West. (With Hartley H. T. Jackson) _The Clever Coyote_, Stackpole, Harrisburg, Pa., and Wildlife Management Inst.i.tute, Was.h.i.+ngton, D. C., 1951. Emphasis upon the economic status and control of the species, an extended cla.s.sification of subspecies, and a full bibliography make this book and Dobie's _The Voice of the Coyote_ complemental to each other rather than duplicative.

PANTHERS

Anybody who so wishes may call them mountain lions. Where there were Negro mammies, white children were likely to be haunted in the night by fear of ghosts. Otherwise, for some children of the South and West, no imagined terror of the night equaled the panther's scream. The Anglo-American lore pertaining to the panther is replete with stories of attacks on human beings. Indian and Spanish lore, clear down to where W.

H. Hudson of the pampas heard it, views the animal as _un amigo de los cristianos_--a friend of man. The panther is another animal as interesting for what people a.s.sociated with him have taken to be facts as for the facts themselves.

BARKER, ELLIOTT S. _When the Dogs Barked 'Treed'_, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1946. Mainly on mountain lions, but firsthand observations on other predatory animals also. Before he became state game warden, the author was for years with the United States Forest Service.

HIBBEN, FRANK C. _Hunting American Lions_, New York, 1948; reprinted by University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. Mr. Hibben considers hunting panthers and bears a terribly dangerous business that only intrepid heroes like him-self would undertake. Sometimes in this book, but more awesomely in _Hunting American Bears_, he manages to out-zane Zane Grey, who had to warn his boy scout readers and puerile-minded readers of added years that _Roping Lions in the Grand Canyon_ is true in contrast to the fictional _Young Lion Hunter_, which uses some of the same material.

HUDSON, W. H. _The Naturalist in La Plata_, New York, 1892. A chapter in this book ent.i.tled "The Puma, or Lion of America" provoked an attack from Theodore Roosevelt (in _Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter_); but it remains the most delightful narrative-essay yet written on the subject.

YOUNG, STANLEY PAUL, and GOLDMAN, EDWARD A. _The Puma, Mysterious American Cat_, American Wildlife Inst.i.tute, Was.h.i.+ngton, D. C., 1946.

Scientific, liberal with information of human interest, bibliography.

We get an a.n.a.lysis of the panther's scream but it does not curdle the blood.

{ill.u.s.t}

30. Birds and Wild Flowers

NEARLY EVERYBODY ENJOYS to an extent the singing of birds and the colors of flowers; to the majority, however, the enjoyment is casual, generalized, vague, in the same category as that derived from a short spell of prattling by a healthy baby. Individuals who study birds and native flora experience an almost daily refreshment of the spirit and growth of the intellect. For them the world is an unending Garden of Delight and a hundred-yard walk down a creek that runs through town or pasture is an exploration. Hardly anything beyond good books, good pictures and music, and good talk is so contributory to the enrichment of life as a sympathetic knowledge of the birds, wild flowers, and other native fauna and flora around us.

The books listed are dominantly scientific. Some include keys to identification. Once a person has learned to use the key for identifying botanical or ornithological species, he can spend the remainder of his life adding to his stature.

BIRDS

BAILEY, FLORENCE MERRIAM. _Birds of New Mexico_, 1928. OP. Said by those who know to be at the top of all state bird books. Much on habits.

BEDICHEK, ROY. _Adventures with a Texas Naturalist_ (1947) and _Karankaway Country_ (1950), Doubleday, Garden City, N. Y. These are books of essays on various aspects of nature, but nowhere else can one find an equal amount of penetrating observation on chimney swifts, Inca doves, swallows, golden eagles, mockingbirds, herons, prairie chickens, whooping cranes, swifts, scissortails, and some other birds. As Bedichek writes of them they become integrated with all life.

BRANDT, HERBERT. _Arizona and Its Bird Life_, Bird Research Foundation, Cleveland, 1951. This beautiful, richly ill.u.s.trated volume of 525 pages lives up to its t.i.tle; the birds belong to the Arizona country, and with them we get pines, mesquites, cottonwoods, John Slaughter's ranch, the northward-flowing San Pedro, and many other features of the land.

Herbert Brandt's _Texas Bird Adventures_, ill.u.s.trated by George Miksch Sutton (Cleveland, 1940), is more on the Big Bend country and ranch country to the north than on birds, though birds are here.

DAWSON, WILLIAM LEON. _The Birds of California_, San Diego, etc., California, 1923. OP. Four magnificent volumes, full in ill.u.s.trations, special observations on birds, and scientific data.

DOBIE, J. FRANK, who is no more of an ornithologist than he is a geologist, specialized on an especially characteristic bird of the Southwest and gathered its history, habits, and folklore into a long article: "The Roadrunner in Fact and Folklore," in _In the Shadow of History_, Publication XV of the Texas Folklore Society, Austin, 1939.

OP. "Bob More: Man and Bird Man," _Southwest Review_, Dallas, Vol.

XXVII, No. 1 (Autumn, 1941).

NICE, MARGARET MORSE. _The Birds of Oklahoma_, Norman, 1931. OP. United States Biological Survey publication.

OBERHOLSER, HARRY CHURCH. The Birds of Texas in ma.n.u.script form. "A stupendous work, the greatest of its genre, by the nation's outstanding ornithologist, who has been fifty years making it." The quotation is condensed from an essay by Roy Bedichek in the _Southwest Review_, Dallas, Vol. x.x.xVIII, No. 1 (Winter, 1953). Maybe some day some man or woman with means will see the light of civilized patriotism and underwrite the publication of these great volumes. Patriotism that does not act to promote the beautiful, the true, and the good had better pipe down.

PETERSON, ROGER TORY. _A Field Guide to Western Birds_ (1941) and _A Field Guide to the Birds_ (birds of the eastern United States, revised 1947), Houghton Mifflin, Boston. These are standard guides for identification. The range, habits, and characteristics of each bird are summarized.

SIMMONS, GEORGE FINLEY. _Birds of the Austin Region_, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1925. A very thorough work, including migratory as well as nesting species.

SUTTON, GEORGE MIKSCH. _Mexican Birds_, ill.u.s.trated with water-color and pen-and-ink drawings by the author, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1951. The main part of this handsome book is a personal narrative--pleasant to read even by one who is not a bird man--of discovery in Mexico. To it is appended a resume of Mexican bird life for the use of other seekers. Sutton's _Birds in the Wilderness: Adventures of an Ornithologist_ (Macmillan, New York, 1936) contains essays on pet roadrunners, screech owls, and other congenial folk of the Big Bend of Texas. _The Birds of Brewster County, Texas_, in collaboration with Josselyn Van Tyne, is a publication of the Museum of Zoology, University of Michigan, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1937.

_Wild Turkey_. Literature on this national bird is enormous. Among books I name first _The Wild Turkey and Its Hunting_, by Edward A. McIlhenny, New York, 1914. OP. McIlhenny was a singular man. His family settled on Avery Island, Louisiana, in 1832; he made it into a famous refuge for wild fowls. The memories of individuals of a family long established on a country estate go back several lifetimes. In two books of Negro folklore and in _The Alligator's Life History_, McIlhenny wrote as an inheritor. Initially, he was a hunter-naturalist, but scientific enough to publish in the _Auk_ and the _Journal of Heredity_. Age, desire for knowledge, and practice in the art of living dimmed his l.u.s.t for hunting and sharpened his interest in natural history. His book on the wild turkey, an extension into publishable form of a ma.n.u.script from a civilized Alabama hunter, is delightful and illuminative reading.

_The Wild Turkey of Virginia_, by Henry S. Mosby and Charles O. Handley, published by the Commission of Game and Inland Fisheries of Virginia, Richmond, 1943, is written from the point of view of wild life management. It contains an extensive bibliography. Less technical is _The American Wild Turkey_, by Henry E. Davis, Small Arms Technical Company, Georgetown, South Carolina, 1949. No strain, or subspecies, of the wild turkey is foreign to any other, but human blends in J. Stokley Ligon, naturalist, are unique. The t.i.tle of his much-in-little book is _History and Management of Merriam's Wild Turkey_, New Mexico Game and Fish Commission, through the University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1946.

WILD FLOWERS AND GRa.s.sES

The scientific literature on botany of western America is extensive. The list that follows is for laymen as much as for botanists.

BENSON, LYMAN, and DARROW, ROBERT A. _A Manual of Southwestern Desert Trees and Shrubs_, Biological Science Bulletin No. 6, University of Arizona, Tucson, 1944. A thorough work of 411 pages, richly ill.u.s.trated, with general information added to scientific description.

CARR, WILLIAM HENRY. _Desert Parade: A Guide to Southwestern Desert Plants and Wildlife_, Viking, New York, 1947.

CLEMENTS, FREDERIC E. and EDITH S. _Rocky Mountain Flowers_, H. W.

Wilson, New York, 1928. Scientific description, with glossary of terms and key for identification.

COULTER, JOHN M. _Botany of Western Texas_, United States Department of Agriculture, Was.h.i.+ngton, 1891-94. OP. Nothing has appeared during the past sixty years to take the place of this master opus.

GEISER, SAMUEL WOOD. _Horticulture and Horticulturists in Early Texas_, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1945.

Historical-scientific, more technical than the author's _Naturalists of the Frontier_.

JAEGER, EDMUND C. _Desert Wild Flowers_, Stanford University Press, California, 1940, revised 1947. Scientific but designed for use by any intelligent inquirer.

LUNDELL, CYRUS L., and collaborators. _Flora of Texas_, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1942-. A "monumental" work, highly technical, being published part by part.

MCKELVEY, SUSAN DELANO. _Yuccas of the Southwestern United States_, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1938. Definitive work in two volumes.

_Range Plant Handbook_, prepared by the Forest Service of the United States Department of Agriculture. United States Government Printing Office, Was.h.i.+ngton, 1937. A veritable encyclopedia, ill.u.s.trated.

SCHULZ, ELLEN D. _Texas Wild Flowers_, Chicago, 1928. Good as a botanical guide and also for human uses; includes lore on many plants.