Frank Graham

National Audubon’s staff and environmental activists suffered a tragic loss this spring with the death, at 73, of John Ogden, a great scientist and an influential conservationist in the preservation of Florida’s Everglades.“John was a stickler for just that—sound, well-conceived, properly conducted, peer-reviewed science,” says Nathaniel P. Reed, a former Audubon board member and Assistant U.S. Secretary of the Interior for Fish, Wildlife, and National Parks in the Nixon and Ford administrations…

As denizens of planet earth, we keep looking for intimate companions on our journeys through space and time. Gods, aliens, or chimps dressed in tuxedos—we outfit them with traits and feelings that resemble our own. Every once in a while a book comes along that even assures us there are close emotional and spiritual relationships between plants and humans (for example, 1973’s The Secret Life of Plants). Another book of the same era argued that playing soft, gentle music to plants enhanced their g…

Calls Beyond Our Hearing: Unlocking the Secrets of Animal Voices By Holly Menino St. Martin’s Press, 288 pages, $25.99 In her new book, Holly Menino describes a visit to Richmond Park in England, where big, monumentally antlered red deer dominate the meadows. Their deep-throated roars keep their harems in line and intimidate rival stags. Some hinds, however, pay little attention to their stag’s roar but respond instead to the high, whinnying calls of smaller sika deer. Marching to a differ…

Life begins at 50—under a sentence of death. This is the thread, and the message, of one of those curious life histories that cry out for a biographer. Phoebe Snetsinger might have been simply a Jane Doe, an unremarkable matron conforming to all post-World War II proprieties in Midwestern suburbs, performing without much enthusiasm the housewifely chores expected of her in providing the creature comforts for an earnest husband and four bright children. But inwardly, Snetsinger was consumed by b…

Two toymakers have literally written the book on building chimney swift nesting towers—vital to the declining  bird’s survival—and turned their Texas property into a thriving Audubon ...

On this 30th anniversary of Audubon’s Project Puffin, memory goes back to a cool, misty July night when Steve Kress landed by boat on a small Maine island at the end of an improbable journey from Newfoundland, carrying a suitcase full of puffins. More precisely, he carried five suitcase-like containers. Each was specifically designed to transport 20 tiny, sooty-gray puffin chicks.“They’re tough little fellows,” Kress said to his companions as they unloaded the cases. “They all survived the trip.…

On a farm in rural Pennsylvania, John James Audubon first glimpsed the curious birds of the New World that would become his lifelong passion. Now the Audubon Center at Mill Grove shares his home and...

Tibet Wild: A Naturalist’s Journeys on the Roof of the World, Island Press, 384 pages, $29.95Place-names sometimes carry a resonance that touches us in the way a song or a poem can. The words Cathay, Baffin Island, Mount Everest, or Machu Picchu have stirred a longing in men and women, locked in humdrum lives, to go to those places in search of a romantic ideal—a quest that often ends in disaster or disillusion. For George Schaller, such a freighted name is Chang Tang. There he found a wealth of…

An early conservationist’s unusual approach to saving embattled wildlife.

Ghost Birds: Jim Tanner and the Quest for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, 1935-1941By Stephen Lyn BalesThe University of Tennessee Press, 270 pages, $29.95 They called and acted nervously when I approached,” James Tanner wrote of the ivory-billed woodpecker in his 400-plus-page travel journal in 1937. “Male whammed on stub two inches long, then flew a short distance, whammed and bammed. Female worked on a dead hackberry stub 25 feet high, 18 inches in diameter, mostly skinned and showing many [beet…