What Remains

Or "Culling II".

I find the specificity of (very diverse) categories left in what I must call my "nature" section fascinating. Before there was so much stuff in there that it would have been hard to see categories beyond that vague term. Maybe negative as in "not too much botany or herpetology" though both exist (birds & bugs have their own large sections, much of it fairly technical).

Now I have:

English "lyrical" (lousy term but I'll get back to it-- think Pluvialis, Rob MacFarlane, J. A. Baker).

Hard evo- bio by scientists who can write (more on this later).

Microbiology writing mostly by scientists like Paul Ewald and Robert Desowitz (I have become utterly fascinated with the evolution of disease and parasites since I got malaria in Zimbabwe years ago).

Weird bird books, like Maurice Burton's out of print Phoenix Re- Born about anting (including with fire, which Wiki misses).

Off- trail true science, like anything about or by the Dysons (those are two links, for "the" and "Dysons").

Odd anti- romantic nature writing like Tom Palmer's classic urban herpetology Landscape with Reptile, Jordan Fisher Smith's spooky Nature Noir, Mary Mycio's oddly optimistic Chernobyl book Wormwood Forest,and Gordon Grice's The Red Hourglass.

And even po- mo urban compendia like Concrete Jungle by artists Alexis Rockman and Mark Dion (though I don't necessarily share their politics-- I probably have a bleaker view of humans than Dawkins, not a rosier one).

Oh, and-- everything about dinosaurs especially bird emergence, and everything about the late Pleistocene.

Soon-- that MacFarlane review and why I generally prefer contemporary Brit nature writing to American-- and exceptions & why.