Discover the unique relationship between the African Nile River crocodile and the Egyptian Plover bird in this fascinating tale based on the symbiotic interaction with two different species, a form of mutualism!

"A compelling, marvelous novel by the acclaimed author of Mink River Declan O Donnell has left Oregon aboard his boat, the Plover, to escape the life that's so troubled him on land. He sets course west into the Pacific in search of solitude. Instead, he finds a crew, each in search of something themselves, and what at first seems a lonely sea voyage becomes a rapturous, heartfelt celebration of life's surprising paths, planned and unplanned"--

Melody and Chad, two piping plovers, build a nest for their eggs on the beach and are surprised and confused when humans arrive to protect the nest.

The Kolea (Pacific Golden Plover) leads a double life. From May to August it nests and raises its young on Alaska's chilly subarctic tundra. Come winter, just as its plumage turns from black and white to gold and brown, the kolea makes its way to Hawaii's distant shores, where it will remain for the next eight months before returning to Alaska. It undertakes this incredible journey of nearly 3,000 miles twice a year without stopping once to rest or feed. Amazingly, young kolea, left far behind on the Alaskan coast, find their way to Hawaii without any help from their parents. Those of us who witness the comings and goings of these amazing birds often wonder how they travel across thousands of miles of trackless ocean without losing their way. What signs or clues do they follow? Do they use the sun and stars as their guides? The ability of the kolea to navigate such a tremendous distance remains a mystery. In the first part of this book you will journey with the kolea from the treeless plains near the Arctic Circle, across the vast Pacific Ocean, to its warm and sunny winter home in Hawaii. The second part contains information on habitat, food, nesting and breeding, and the challenges facing scientists who study kolea migration. Both sections are clearly written and will engage and inform young readers.

Most Perl programmers were originally trained as C and Unix programmers, so the Perl programs that they write bear a strong resemblance to C programs. However, Perl incorporates many features that have their roots in other languages such as Lisp. These advanced features are not well understood and are rarely used by most Perl programmers, but they are very powerful. They can automate tasks in everyday programming that are difficult to solve in any other way. One of the most powerful of these techniques is writing functions that manufacture or modify other functions. For example, instead of writing ten similar functions, a programmer can write a general pattern or framework that can then create the functions as needed according to the pattern. For several years Mark Jason Dominus has worked to apply functional programming techniques to Perl. Now Mark brings these flexible programming methods that he has successfully taught in numerous tutorials and training sessions to a wider audience.* Introduces powerful programming methodsnew to most Perl programmersthat were previously the domain of computer scientists* Gradually builds up confidence by describing techniques of progressive sophistication* Shows how to improve everyday programs and includes numerous engaging code examples to illustrate the methods

Looks at the lives, loves, and losses of the residents of the village of Neawanaka, Oregon.

A trans-world journey with an extraorindary shorebird—from Australia's southern ocean to the Arctic and back—that explores the mysteries of the natural world and its power to heal. As the sun lowered and turned Gulf St Vincent fiery, they each called a high-pitched 'peeooowiii!', flashed their black wing-pits, spread their tail skirts and took flight... In a luminous new boook, Andrew Darby follows the odysseys of two seemingly-humble Grey Plovers, little-known migratory shorebirds, as they take previously uncharted ultramarathon flights from the southern coast of Australia to Arctic breeding grounds. On these death-defying flights they dodge predators, typhoons, exhaustion, and countless other dangers before they can breed...and then survive the jrouney all over again and return south to their feeding grounds. But the greatest threat to these, and other long-distance migrants on the flyway, is China's "dragon economy," which is engulfing their vital Yellow Sea staging spots. In Flight Lines, we meet the dedicated people of all nationalities and backgrounds working to save these intrepid birds, from Russia to Alaska, from the rim of the Arctic Sea to the coasts of the Southern Ocean. Out of their hard-won science Darby finds hope for the birds—an unexpected bright light for our times. But his journey to understand these marvellous birds almost ends when he is suddenly diagnosed with an incurable cancer. Then he finds science coming to his rescue too, as his own story and the journey of these little birds intersect in an unexpected and beautiful way.

Susan Cerulean’s memoir trains a naturalist’s eye and a daughter’s heart on the lingering death of a beloved parent from dementia. At the same time, the book explores an activist’s lifelong search to be of service to the embattled natural world. During the years she cared for her father, Cerulean also volunteered as a steward of wild shorebirds along the Florida coast. Her territory was a tiny island just south of the Apalachicola bridge where she located and protected nesting shorebirds, including least terns and American oystercatchers. I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird weaves together intimate facets of adult caregiving and the consolation of nature, detailing Cerulean’s experiences of tending to both. The natural world is the “sustaining body” into which we are born. In similar ways, we face not only a crisis in numbers of people diagnosed with dementia but also the crisis of the human-caused degradation of the planet itself, a type of cultural dementia. With I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird, Cerulean reminds us of the loving, necessary toil of tending to one place, one bird, one being at a time.

if you enjoy a poem it was meant for you if you don't it probably wasn't

In the course of creating the New Zealand that we have to-day, with its law and order, property rights, personal safety and individual freedom, numerous people - both European and friendly Maori - were killed by tribal violence. They gave their lives in the cause of creating order out of anarchy and are just as deserving of the nation's respect and sympathy as are soldiers who die on the battle-field. In this book some of these brave but unfortunate people are introduced to the modern reader, together with brief details of their lives and of their untimely and brutal deaths, thus bringing to life an aspect of our early history that has been overlooked for far too long. New Zealand's history is being rewritten with a new narrative in favour of the ever growing 'grievance industry'. In the process real historical events are being swept under the carpet and out of sight if they get in the way of this new agenda. This book, based on facts alone and impeccably researched, tells of some of these long-buried events as they really happened.