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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
evocative glimpse into the history of Mexican ornithology,
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This review is from: At a Bend in a Mexican River. (Hardcover)
As you drive from Cuidad Victoria to Cuidad Mante you'll pass roadside stands offering mango pie and then you'll reach a turnoff to a dirt road leading to Azteca. Take that road about a mile (if it's not too muddy) and you'll reach the Rio Sabinas. Just before you reach the river you'll pass the homestead owned by the family of Everts Storms, mentioned in this work and others. Walk over a suspended bridge and stand high over the water, and you can almost see George M Sutton and his associates diligently seeking out what was then the little known birdlife of southwestern Tamaulipas.Read accounts like this if you want to be transported to another time, before birders discovered places like Gomez Farias and the El Cielo Biosphere Preserve. Overlook the "collecting" that is so frequently mentioned; we view the world through different prisms today. Birders planning a trip to the region will want to read this strictly for the historical perspective, but even non-birding friends have expressed appreciation for this work. Birders will want to have a modern checklist with scientific names handy, since some of the nomenclature found here is no longer in use.
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Beautiful Vision of a Vanished Eden,
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This review is from: At a Bend in a Mexican River. (Hardcover)
I have traveled fairly extensively in Mexico from Baja California Norte to Chiapas, including Nuevo Leon, Michoacan, Guanajauto, Sonora, Sinaloa, Baja California Sur and Chihuahua, and have enjoyed it immensely. I have never had a bad trip into Mexico, but my visits stopped during the last decade as the drug war heated up. Mexico is now in bad shape, both environmentally and socially. In my visit to Michoacan and the monarch overwintering areas I saw the denuding of the forest, in Chiapas I found fish apparently killed by agricultural runoff along the Pacific Coast. I have heard that the wild areas of Baja California Sur that I visited in the early 1970s have changed and that the beaches of Bahía Concepción are not as abandoned as they were when I chased tiger beetles along the beach at El Requeson. The Colorado River Delta, where a friend and I got lost in the 1960s, and the upper Gulf of California, where I photographed giant fiddler crabs, are seriously damaged. The huge totuava (fish) that fishermen offered us near Puertecitos are no longer to be had at any price and are federally protected as endangered. Finally the drug war has made many parts of the country (and some of our own borderlands) too dangerous for safe travel.George Miksch Sutton's classic book "At a Bend in a Mexican River" thus offers a poignant view of a world that is probably only extant in much smaller pieces than it was when he spent time there. He notes some of the changes that had occurred during his time, including the decline of the world's largest woodpecker, the Imperial Woodpecker (a close relative of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker), but said that he was optimistic. I wish I could say the same, but I cannot. However his paintings of the birds found in Tamaulipas and further south are wonderful in every way and show the influence of his mentor Louis Agassiz Fuertes. Both were great bird artists. This is an excellent book, which also saddened me immensely. I only wish things were as they were then, at least in regard to the biota. I fear that many organisms will vanish before we have even named them, and that those that we have described and named will disappear before we know anything of their biology, as the Imperial Woodpecker seems to have done. I recommend this as a chronicle of what Mexico has lost and may yet loose and as a sample of the work of a remarkable bird artist.
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