We will meet at Anderson's Bookshop in downtown Naperville, IL, 123 West Jefferson Avenue (between Main and Webster), (630) 355-BOOK (355-2665). We plan to meet weekdays every other month, from 7:00pm to about 8:30 (the store closes at 9pm). For questions, please contact Peter Chen 2.0. For more references, here is a collection of nature pages on the web.

Sent: Monday, February 28, 2005 10:31 AM
Subject: book club meeting: Wednesday, 2/23

Present: Jim, Kathleen, and Peter. We discussed "Winter World:
The Ingenuity of Animal Survival" by Bernd Heinrich. Heinrich
is a professor of biology at the University of Vermont who spends
time living in the forests of western Maine. His observations have
led him to conclusions such as:
* Birds originally evolved long flight feathers on forelimbs to
  reduce wetting of the insulating down and contour feathers.
* Golden-crowned kinglets feed not on springtails as winter food,
  as reported in the literature, but on caterpillars of the 
  Geometrid moth One-Spotted Variant (Hypagyrtis unipunctata).
* Red squirrels do not always build underground nests, as reported
  in the literature, but often spend the night in tunnels under
  decaying stumps.

The kinglets are bird-brained: their brain comprise 6.8% of body
weight (compared to 1.9% for humans). Brains are metabolically
expensive, and in the kinglet the relatively large brain can be
a source of heat loss in the harsh Maine winter; but the intelligence
helps them search for scarce food on winter twigs, and kinglets are
constantly foraging for food to fuel their tiny bodies and large
brains. Turtles, on the other hand, have miniscule brains that don't
require constant upkeep. An air-breathing painted turtle can survive
6 months buried in oxygen-poor mud under water. What is death to a
turtle, Heinrich asks? He found a road-kill snapping turtle and
chopped off its head to end its miseries and feed the carcass to his
ravens. But by next day the birds had not touched the meat: the
turtle was still capable of retracting her legs inside the shattered
shell. Heinrich also speculates that mammals do not hibernate through
the winter because they need to periodically heat up to sleep - perchance
to dream? Animals in winter torpor do not show the EEG activity
associated with sleeping and dreaming. Hibernation or winter torpor
are periods of reduced respiration to conserve fuel, and should not
be called "winter sleeping" as some sources I have seen state.

Our next meeting will be Tuesday 4/19, 7pm, the book will be
"The Sea Around Us", by Rachel Carson.

Peter

A partial list of books from the St. Charles/Geneva Park District club is listed below:

Date	Title	Author
1998:
2/19	Biophilia	Edward Wilson
3/19	Desert Solitaire	Edward Abbey
4/23	Listening Point	Sigurd Olson
7/20	Into the Wild	John Krakauer
8/17	Born Naked	Farley Mowat
9/21	Pilgrim at Tinker Creek	Annie Dillard
10/19	A Book of Bees	Sue Hubbell
11/16	Winter Count	Barry Lopez
12/14	A Sand County Almanac	Aldo Leopold
1999:
3/22	The Book of Yaak	Rick Bass
5/24	Reading the Landscape of America	May Watts
6/28	Last Chance to See	Douglas Adams
7/26	Life on the Mississippi	Mark Twain
8/23	On Suspect Terrain	John McPhee
9/27	The Sacred Earth	Jason Gardner
10/25	The Tracker	Tom Borwn
11/22	Living by Water	Brenda Peterson
12/27	Universe Story	Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry