The Secret Wisdom of Nature: Trees, Animals, and the Extraordinary Balance of All Living Things -— Stories from Science and Observation (The Mysteries of Nature Trilogy Book 3)

As insurance, they extend many filaments parallel to each other, and they simply switch the connection to neighboring threads. Incidentally, that’s why when you’re out collecting ceps, boletes, or chanterelles in the fall it doesn’t matter whether you twist the mushrooms or cut them off (a perennial bone of contention among nature lovers). Any dama

TREES CAN ACHIEVE great things together without meaning to, even when their achievements have nothing to do with survival.

There’s a simple reason these treeless landscapes delight us so much. We are, from a biological perspective, animals of the plains, and we feel secure in landscapes with extensive views where we can move around easily.

Natural deciduous forests left to their own devices do not burn, and fire was not part of the ecosystem in these latitudes.

Lightning plays its part by using its energy to combine atmospheric nitrogen with oxygen to create compounds plants can break down and absorb, and some trees and other plants have developed the ability to transform atmospheric nitrogen into plant-available compounds with the help of bacteria that live in special nodules on their roots. Alders, for

There are two forces at work here. Sick or weak animals separate themselves from others of their kind to hide in the undergrowth, or on hot summer days they wander near or into small streams to cool any wounds they might have. Here, they wait for death. That makes sense, because this way they don’t endanger their kin—weak animals attract the attent

Insects exploit laws of nature to protect themselves against freezing. They use sugars they produce naturally to create a kind of antifreeze, and they empty their gut to minimize their water content, because tiny amounts of water don’t freeze until temperatures fall far below 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Five microliters of water (which is a vanishingly

This was the year wolves caught in Canada were released in Yellowstone to restore the park’s ecological balance. What happened in the years that followed, and continues to this day, is what scientists call a trophic cascade. Basically, this means a change in the entire ecosystem via the food chain, starting at the top. The wolf was now at the top o

Pigs were driven into forests in fall to fatten up on acorns and beechnuts. In those days, animal fat was still prized. The term “mast years” comes from these times. Mast years are years when there is massive production of acorns and beechnuts, and they cycle around every three to five years.