Diane Ackerman - The Rarest of the Rare: Vanishing Animals, Timeless Worlds

A writer whose back yard is quite literally the entire planet. She is dedicated to her subjects in a serious, formal way, even as her inspiration reveals the whimsical, impulsive fascination of scientists.

Los Angeles Times Book Review

Diane Ackerman has spun a treatise that is as accessible as a travel guide, weaving gossamer words that transfix the unwary armchair explorer. The experience is a sensuous bondage.

Baltimore Sun

Enraptured descriptions of creatures and their habitats conceal meticulous craft illuminating and impassioned.

People

Smart, compelling, and a pleasure to read.

Washington Times

It is Ackermans great gift to make real creatures that are sometimes relegated to mere numbers and abstractions exhilarating.

Miami Herald

She tackles issues of biodiversity with intelligence and passion.

Seattle Times

Entertaining, outraged, despairing, passionate, fearful, and hopeful. Her writing is as original as the animals she encounters.

San Francisco Chronicle

A Slender Thread

The Rarest of the Rare

A Natural History of Love

The Moon by Whale Light

Jaguar of Sweet Laughter: New and Selected Poems

A Natural History of the Senses

Reverse Thunder

On Extended Wings

Lady Faustus

Twilight of the Tenderfoot

Wife of Light

The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral

FOR CHILDREN

Monk Seal Hideaway

Poet, essayist, and naturalist, Diane Ackerman was born in Waukegan, Illinois. She received an M.A., M.F.A., and Ph.D. from Cornell University. Her poetry has been published in many leading literary journals and in the books The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral (1976), Wife of Light (1978), Lady Faustus (1988), and Jaguar of Sweet Laughter: New And Selected Poems (1991).

Her works of nonfiction include A Slender Thread (1996); The Rarest of the Rare (1995); A Natural History of Love (1994); The Moon by Whale Light and Other Adventures Among Bats, Penguins, Crocodilians, and Whales (1991); A Natural History of the Senses (1990); and On Extended Wings (1985), a memoir of flying. Her bestselling A Natural History of the Senses was the basis for a PBS television series, Mystery of the Senses, in which she was featured as host and narrator. Monk Seal Hideaway, her first childrens book, appeared recently, and she is writing other nature books for children.

Ms. Ackerman has received the Academy of American Poets Lavan Award, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation, among other recognitions. Honored as a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library, she has taught at several universities, including Columbia and Cornell. Her essays about nature and human nature have appeared in National Geographic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Parade, and other journals.

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JANUARY 1997

Copyright1995 by Diane Ackerman

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1995.

Some of the essays in this work were originally published in other versions in Cond Nast Traveler, Life, National Geographic, The New Yorker, and Parade.

Readers interested in the poems written during some of these trips may wish to turn to Jaguar of Sweet Laughter: New and Selected Poems, where they will find a group of Amazon poems and one set on French Frigate Shoals. They will also find there poems about the Antarctic and other locales mentioned in The Moon by Whale Light.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Random House edition as follows:

Ackerman, Diane.
The rarest of the rare : vanishing animals, timeless worlds / Diane Ackerman.1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76335-8
1. Endangered species. 2. Rare animals.
3. Endangered ecosystems. 4. Monarch butterflyMigration.
I. Title.
QH75.A32 1995
574.529dc20 95-8499

Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com

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On the home planet, in the high latitudes, near the eastern edge of the North American continent, between two glacier-carved mountains, at the foot of a lake where humans balance at speed on knife blades, under gray skies, while ice pellets cover the ground with a thin layer of gooseflesh, in the waking-sleep of December, whose labored breathing is as familiar as a dozing spouses, near a county airport, where steel mastodons land calmly but Canada geese circle in honking-mad wedges, among islands of urban forest browsed by white-tailed deer, in a cul-de-sac at the end of a key-shaped lane, behind a modest white house whose windows drink in the sky, one discovers a small part of ones address: that tilt of planet and mind we call winter.

Despite the cold, my backyard welcomes a riot of species. On two apple trees, mummified fruits hang like rusty bells. Although I cannot hear or smell them, I know that to the deer they are tolling with scent. A Japanese maple outside my study window has lost most of its leaves. The few lifeless, brown, twisted ones that still dangle have so little weight theyre constantly atwitch and ashiver. On the hunched redbud, dry seedpods rattle in the wind like tiny gourds. Cardinals, chickadees, and squirrels use the interlocking branches of the redbud and maple as a highway. Occasionally they slip from an ice-jacketed branch, or tumble when the winds swivel fast. But theyre used to seeing me behind the windowpanes, at a safe distance. I judge the direction and force of the wind from watching them. For warmth, they stand facing the wind, so it blows in the same direction their feathers or fur grows. Today the cardinals are puffed up like wads of cotton candy, and theyre all pointing east.

Although I rarely spot field mice and shrews in the flesh, I often see them tunneling beneath the snow. Sometimes a rabbit or a groundhog strays from its nest. The five raccoons, balled up in the trunk of a half-dead maple tree on the north side of the house, wore a path across my lawn all summer, tumbled the garbage cans, and skittered across the roof. I know just where their den isa hundred feet up in a gouged-out bolus of woodbecause one pantingly hot summer day they crept slowly out of their nest and draped themselves on the branches to cool off. Im not sure where the garter snakes have gone for the winter. Some years, at springtime, I find them waking indoors, so I suspect theyve found a toasty bolt-hole in the walls or near the furnace. Three brown bats are hibernating under a house eave. Crows as big as eggplants weigh down the trees. Other birds visit the feeders, leaving footprint hieroglyphics in the snow. I miss the frogs and insects and spiders and butterflies that combine in warm weather to make a tapestry of fidget and color that stretches from belowground to the sky. I miss the flowers, whose buoyant colors and smells drench ones senses. But even in winter, many life-forms homestead this small piece of world.