When Nature was Golden
Let’s open with a few passages of deathless prose from the classics.
EMORY’S SOFT-SHELLED TURTLE (18 in.; to 35 lb.) is the only Southwest member of an edible group with long necks and short tempers. Handle with care.
BELTED KINGFISHER Where there are fish there are Kingfishers, beating the air in irregular flight, diving into water with a splash and emerging with fish in their beaks.
THE EASTERN MOLE or common mole makes the mounds that dot your lawn. You are unlikely to see any moles, for they stay underground unless molested.
You saw them in the basement of your third-grade best friend, or in your school library. If you were lucky, you had one or two at home—your older sister read them first, years ago; maybe they’d even belonged to one of your parents. Paperback books just a bit smaller than pulp fiction novels, though equally thick, their illustrated pages of a glossier, higher quality. The typeface was Futura, that design marvel of yore, also seen in the old Hall of Dinosaurs in the American Museum of Natural History. Insects, Seashores, Mammals, Reptiles and Amphibians—which did you have? The Golden Guides gave us our natural world in all its glory, and managed to do it in a singular style, dry yet affectionate, concisely informative and never, ever dumbed-down. They were written for children, but each, too, is a cracking read for any adult eager to learn. Or to remember.
Naturalist Herbert S. Zim, who founded this series of guides and wrote many of them, was born in New York in 1909. Raised there and in Southern California, he finished his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D at Columbia University. He was then a science teacher for twenty-five years—at Ethical Culture schools in New York City, and later at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. One wonders where on earth he found the time to crank out so many books. Each was a loving collaboration with other educators, not solely Zim’s effort. But the synthesis of these people, the meticulous research required to bring together all the info, was his responsibility, from 1949 until the early 1970s. Zim, in 1969, was also the editor of an 18-volume set of encyclopedias named Our Wonderful World.
Of the 84 Golden Guides, Zim wrote or co-wrote 24. Is it confirmation bias that makes me believe those are the best of the bunch? The simple style is charming, with phrases like Rock Ground Squirrels, found in the Southwest, are our largest terrestrial squirrels. What grace: with a hint of pride to be from the United States, he said that the squirrels are ours. (I also appreciate that he uses the word “unique” correctly, without qualifiers. The Barn Owl is unique, not “totally” or “somewhat” unique.) The occasional anachronism amuses. Once in awhile Zim tells us which kind of turtle or ground squirrel makes a good pet, if captured.
You have been seeing birds as far back as you can remember and you will continue seeing them wherever you may be. It’s a real pleasure to see them. You can see more birds and more kinds of birds by learning how to look. This book will help you. It is not written for the expert, but for people who want to see birds just for the joy of it.
First become familiar with the mammals pictured and described. Look through the Key to Mammals on the next pages so that you can recognize the major mammal groups. Try to see the mammal well enough to decide, for example, whether it is a rodent or a shrew.
Familiarity with fishes gained by thumbing through pages at odd moments may enable you to make rough identifications at sight. Use this book as an “arm-chair” guide, but also take it into the field with you, for that is where it can be used best. On fishing trips take it along in a plastic bag.
Originally named the Golden Nature Guides, the series name was shortened to “Golden Guides” when they began branching out into other topics—for example, Guns, Sports Cars, and Casino Games. But these adult subjects did not make it into most family rooms, and the more popular guides about flora and fauna, insects, weather, stars, and the like are the ones most frequently found today. The illustrations by James Gordon Irving and others are remarkably detailed, the beauty of pure accuracy from a time when nature photography was rare.
A particularly enchanting feature of the Guides is the family tree, usually a two-page spread of swooping, color-gradated branches, each limb ending in a small picture of an animal in its biological order, labeled something like “Cutlass Fishes” or “Scorpion-Flies.” No less an artist than Matt Groening would eventually parody this format for his Life In Hell comic, describing the evolution of record-store clerks from sullen teens.
Herbert Zim, in his long career as an educator, was the one who brought lab instruction into science courses at the elementary-school level. Anyone who looked through a microscope before they reached ninth grade might have him to thank. And one attribute of Golden Guides is the way they expect one to get involved, not just in the field, but with “amateur activities” like building a birdhouse or preserving animal tracks in plaster. Through such deep engagement, the reader is encouraged not just to appreciate nature, but to discover new things about it, making new contributions to science.
He demanded no less of himself. Going through what biographical information there is on Zim, which is all very straightforward, one notices the list of scientific associations he belonged to, numbering more than twenty. They included the Audubon Society, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Everglades Natural History Association, and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Truly, this was a vigorous and busy man.
Like so many cultural products of their time, the Golden Guides can look antithetical to today’s progressive values. Just ask the Yuman Indian woman who sits weaving cotton, bare-breasted, in one of the pictures in a guide to the American Southwest. In little vignettes we see depicted dozens of trappers, fishermen, tourists, birdwatchers—all white, mostly male. Under the entry for “Other Suckers,” Zim claims “some are so easily caught that every boy knows them.” If the Guides were written just for boys, this is a great shame, though their ubiquity meant that many girls of all different backgrounds would find them. The scientific language is devoid of prejudice, by its nature, and is there for any young person dedicated enough to study it. It prizes the natural world above all. One passage recently took me by surprise for its passion, on a page about the fishing industry: If you are interested in fishes, conservation—the wise use of all our natural resources—is your problem too.
Maybe it’s our current predicament that makes one particularly fond of the outside world, and of non-humans. Back in March, I started watching a live online feed from The Aquarium of the Pacific each night, comforted by the variety of fish, sharks, and rays that swam peacefully by. Curious about a small fish with long, showy gold fins, I consulted Fishes to identify it, and Irving didn’t disappoint. Meanwhile, Herbert Zim informed me that the species, named Lookdown, belong to the mackerel-like family of “jacks” and are fine eating.
In 1934, Zim married the Russian-born Sonia (Sonnie) Bleeker, who had studied anthropology at Columbia. The couple had two sons. Bleeker, too, worked in the book world—as an editor at Simon and Schuster, then as a full-time children’s book author. They eventually moved to Florida. Just like the descriptions in the guides, these biographical facts fall well short of being dull. They force me to imagine how energetic, how full life must have been in the Zim household as the kids grew up; and how many subtropical species kept Herbert company in his later years. After Bleeker’s death, he married Grace K. Showe in 1978. He died at Plantation Key in 1994, of complications from Alzheimer’s.
LIVE OAK has become a symbol of the South. The low, spreading tree, often covered with Spanish moss, marks old plantations and roadside plantings. The elliptical, blunt-tipped, leathery leaves are evergreen—that is, they remain green and on the tree throughout the year. The acorns are small but edible; wood is used for furniture. Two other southeastern Oaks (Laurel and Willow) have leaves of somewhat similar shape, but they are thinner and more pointed than Live Oak. Several western Oaks are evergreen. Botanists apply the unqualified name Live Oak only to this species. Height 40 to 60 ft. Beech family
In a Manhattan backyard in the middle of June, a couple of mourning doves fly between the trees. I’m aware that the gentle woop-woop-woop sound they make is not their voices but their wingbeats. The dogwood’s cream-yellow blooms have begun to fade, as is proper at this time. Above me a juvenile blue jay, still fluffy, shrieks out his typical noisy cry. I’m intrigued to see a red speck moving among the hairs on my arm—it’s a clover mite, an insect I haven’t noticed in decades. As recently as 1982, I was a four-year-old marveling at the rolling movement of clover mites on a windowsill—smaller than pin heads, bright candy-apple red. Somewhere along the line they stopped showing up, at least with the frequency they did back then. Now, seeing even one evinces a swell of emotion. (Incidentally, the same is true of another brightly-colored beauty, the red eft, which used to be so numerous in summer that we had to tiptoe on New York State gravel roads to avoid stepping on them.)
We learn more from Zim’s texts than he bargained for. His Golden Guides speak of a midcentury United States where all these animals and plants were still commonly seen. Just based upon my memories from the past 20 or 30 years, there seem to be fewer animals everywhere; in the 1950s, then, was the Earth just teeming with them, in every corner of every suburban lawn? Having learned that the biomass of insects, in particular, has started to fall fast, I yearn for the spectacle of clover mites and hastily do a search for them. Yes, the internet reassures me: we in New York City still have lots of the red bugs, enough to warrant a FAQ page from a pest-control company. They’re harmless to humans, pets, houses, and furniture. They munch grass and reproduce parthenogenically, which means every individual can lay viable eggs, without mating.
Of course, the sites telling me this haven’t worded their data quite as eloquently as Herbert Zim would have. Still, I thank him for the spark of curiosity that got me there at all. He taught me not just how to identify a clover mite, but how to care about her.
by Amanda Nazario