Canadian Visitors

I confess I seldom get that oversized periodical, The New York Review of Books. This is not because I don't like books, or don't like book reviews, but rather because of a few reasons, one chiefly being I started to feel overwhelmed by what went unread in my house after I did start to get it years ago. Too many things started piling up. I had to cut the cord.

This bothered me because I knew that occasionally Russell Baker had a review in there, and I’ve been reading his writing since sometime in the mid-1960s. But, as can happen in this connected age, I learned through a Tweet from @obitsman that there was a Baker review in the February 21st edition of the NYRB. So, I went out and bought a copy.

Mr. Baker's review is of  'Nature Wars: The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Combacks Turned Backyards into Battlegrounds,' by Jim Sterba. Finally something sane about animals. About the environment. Things don't always disappear. Quite the opposite. They come back stronger than ever.

And here's where I detected I had an ally. Mr. Baker seldom does these book reviews, but I suspect he chooses the ones he does do. So, why choose a book that seems to debunk all the hand-wringing of a disappearing nature?

One clue is found when Mr. Baker adds to the narrative that his local newspaper has announced that 250 vultures have picked his town of Leesburg as their forwarding address. They are not movie extras sent there to appear in a sequel to Alfred Hitchcok's movie 'The Birds.' They are uninvited, and causing a good deal of property damage.

When I was working there were many indications I was getting older. One of them was that I was continually surrounded by younger adults who seemed to hang out in the print room whenever it seemed I was watching my job come out of the printer who couldn't help exclaim, "there you go, killing all those tress."

Homicide seemed called for, but probably tough to convince an inevitable like-minded jury that it was justified. I did usually manage a terse remark that I had news for them: ‘Don’t worry, trees grow back.’ A theme of the book.

For whatever reason, I tend to hold onto nuggets of thought that are wrapped in numbers. Thus, when the time seems appropriate, I have forever found myself repeating that I once read that the average teen-age boy thinks of sex every 14 seconds. Clearly, I don’t remember it being that frequent, but obviously, we haven’t been given enough credit for getting through school.

I don’t know anything about Leesburg and why it would attract 250 vultures. I don't know why we, like many other communities, have an infestation of Canadian geese down the street in the park. The book, and Mr. Baker's review, help explain what's going on that has made this happen.

The numerical nugget that I take away from the review is that Canadian geese apparently have a primitive digestive system. So, it turns out they poop often, as much as five times an hour. Good or bad at math, that's every 12 minutes. The adult goose can contribute 1-3 pounds of waste a day to the ground. This surely explains why freshly fallen snow is suddenly turned yellow after reacting to shotgun shells of shit everywhere you look.

Thanks to Mr. Baker's review I can provide a literary retort to the print room kibitzing, if I ever need it again.

"There's a book I think you should read. You remember books, no?"

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