The Secret Wisdom of Nature: Trees, Animals, and the Extraordinary Balance of All Living Things -— Stories from Science and Observation (The Mysteries of Nature Trilogy Book 3)

TREES CAN ACHIEVE great things together without meaning to, even when their achievements have nothing to do with survival.

Deciduous trees, after all, show that there are other ways of doing things. As long as they’re alive, they’re absolutely immune to fire. This is something you can easily test for yourself (but please with just a single green twig). No matter how long you hold a flame underneath it, the twig will not burn. Spruce, Pines & Co., in contrast, ignit

There’s a simple reason these treeless landscapes delight us so much. We are, from a biological perspective, animals of the plains, and we feel secure in landscapes with extensive views where we can move around easily.

Researchers from the United States suspect that there are definite disadvantages to our powerful brain. They compared the self-destructive programming of human cells with a similar program run by ape cells. This program destroys and dismantles old and defective cells. Their comparison showed that the cleanup mechanism is a lot more effective in ape

One simple standard definition is that nature is the opposite of culture—that is to say, everything that people have not created or changed.

Trees have only two strategies to survive this roller coaster. First, most can survive in a wide range of climates. You can find beeches from Sicily to southern Sweden and birches from Lapland to Spain. Second, the genetic bandwidth within a species is very wide, so in a forest you can always find individual trees that can deal with the new conditi

As insurance, they extend many filaments parallel to each other, and they simply switch the connection to neighboring threads. Incidentally, that’s why when you’re out collecting ceps, boletes, or chanterelles in the fall it doesn’t matter whether you twist the mushrooms or cut them off (a perennial bone of contention among nature lovers). Any dama

There is, for example, the coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens), one of the mightiest trees in the world. It can grow more than 300 feet tall and live for many thousands of years. Its bark is soft, thick, and slow to burn. If you find one of these in a city park (and you can find them in many city parks all over the world), step right up to it and

In contrast to a human brain, a woodpecker’s brain sits firmly in its skull so that it doesn’t bounce back and forth while it’s using its beak to deal staccato blows to a tree. As an added precaution, there’s a special springy support behind its beak that cushions the blows before they travel to its skull. Despite this, fresh wood is simply too den