Hungry Hollow: The Story of a Natural Place [Paperback]

Hungry Hollow is simply an ordinary creek winding through about a mile of ordinary forest and meadow somewhere east of the Rocky Mountains. But like all such places, it is also a vast and intricate web of life with extensions that reach around the planet, back into prehistoric time, and within to a teeming, bizarre microscopic world. In dozens of short, wonderfully imaginative chapters, A.K. Dewdney introduces us to the denizens of this world. We encounter a hackberry tree whose branches perfectly reproduce the taxonomic Tree of Life, learn how it would look and feel to shrink by stages to the size of an amoeba while swimming in a river, watch a toad win the lottery, and see the world of Hungry Hollow from the viewpoint of bears, earthworms, and even stones. This is an excursion into natural history like no other.Procyon lotor.- The Tippecanoe Sea.- Dianne sapiens.- The Hackberry.- The Ants Journey.- Congress of Birds.- Microperson.- Water.- Cymbella and the Hypotrich.- On the Back of a Turtle.- The Meadow.- The Labyrinths.- Prayer of the Mantis.- The Hydraulic Plant.- The Storm.- Abundance.- In the Forest.- The Art of Decay.- Bear.- Stories in Stone.- Hungry Creek.- Requiem for a Toad.- Survival of the Lucky.- The Book of Kaolinite.- Didelphis virginianus.- Animal Minds.- Permanent Clearcut.- Ursa Major.- Notes. ...220 pages explaining biological phenomena add up to a literary image of the magic of life. New ScientistIn a series of short, wonderfully imaginative chapters, A.K. Dewdney introduces us to the vast and intricate web that is Hungry Hollow, a seemingly ordinary stretch of river somewhere east of the Rocky Mountains. We encounter a hackberry tree that perfectly reproduces the taxonomic Tree of Life, learn how it would look and feel to shrink by stages to the size of an amoeba while swimming in a river, watch a toad win the lottery, and see the world of Hungry Hollow from the viewpoint of bears, earthworms and even stones. This is a natlSi