21 | May | 2011 | Greg Laden's Blog

Both my desktop and my laptop started working more slowly a few weeks ago. This indicated that something about the operating system (some version of Ubuntu Linux) changed in a bad way. Or, perhaps, since the slowness was mostly noticed in the web browser, the newer version of Firefox was somehow borked. It turns out that the latter is true to some extent because the developers of Firefox left Linux out in the cold with hardware acceleration (and despite the excuses for that I’m still annoyed … had the same issues applied to, say Windows, they would not have left Windows out in the cold). But that is a digression. It turns out that the cause was related to something I had installed that was related to the system. This little problem has been solved, but it brings up another issue, which has also been addressed on the blog Linux in Exile. This is what I wanted to talk about.
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On the Wing: American Birds in Migration is a children’s book suitable for up to Middle School or thereabouts. Remarkably, this ten year old volume is actually fairly accurate and comprehensible, covering most of the major aspects of bird migration, discussion ecological patterns, mechanisms, and methods used to study the phenomenon.

It is written and illustrated by Carol Lerner, who has prodcued well over a dozen anture related books of similar (high) quality including Butterflies in the Garden and Backyard Birds of Summer. Since these books are all at least ten years old you can find them at very low prices in used bookstores (in meatspace or on line). They’re all good.

More books on birds.