![]() ![]() Together they breathe better than 8 1/2 million gallons of air a day. ![]() The champions are the microbes and the plants. Insects, spiders, and worms breathe about one million gallons per day. But this is nothing compared to the breath of the invisible. On the preserve alone, the mammals breathe 650,000 gallons of air per day the birds, about 30,000 gallons, and the reptiles and amphibians, about 450 gallons. What then is the total volume of air that is breathed in this place in a day? The amount breathed by the visible creatures is astonishing. One breath of a shrew, for example, is about the size of a couscous grain. Of course, some of our breathers do not take much air in a single gulp. If we take every creature as representative of its species, we get around 19 million breaths per minute, 1.1 billion breaths per hour, 27 billion breaths per day. There may be three brown bats on the reserve… Seventy-five blue jays breathing at 49 times per minute… a big brown bat can breathe as little as 4 times per minute in winter torpor, but in rapid flight she breathes 600 times per minute or even more. There may be about 20 coyotes on the land, and they breathe 13 times per minute…A ruby throated hummingbird is sampling the flowers, takin in air at the rate of 250 breaths per minute, and maybe a dozen of them in the preserve. Honeybees, thought they do not breathe the way we do, have spiracles that take in air at a rate of ten milliliters, or a third of an ounce, per hour, and there are perhaps six hundred thousand bees here… White footed mice breathes about 135 times a minute, and shrews between 152-800 times a minute and there are 1,800 white footed mice and 2,000 shrews.Īt least two Home sapiens breathing an average of 19 times a minute, and let’s assume another two-dozen humans hiking or working the preserve…A song sparrow breathes about 63 times each minute, and in spring, there may be about sixty more song sparrows on 2,000 acres…High overhead a pair of turkey vultures patrol, finding thermals, and in a minute each breathes 9 times, and about 18 vultures on the preserve. How much breath is in the air around us? Let’s take a walk and count the breaths on a 2000 acre nature reserve in upstate New York. I didn’t catch many references to how indigenous peoples regarded air, and the book is dense, but that is one failing I noticed and hope could be corrected in the future. Who in a million years could have predicted that a book about air would be about music also? And how many breaths are in the air around us? Pheromones and spiders flinging themselves into the air? I could guess forests and plants, pollen and things in the air, flying, weather, but still the richness of detail was magnificent. I liked his book Dirt, and think I love this one, and can’t wait to read Oak. A turtle can hold a breath for months.Īm I the only person in the world that reads a book like this and is breathless with wonder, and wishes I could write poetry based on the wonders he reveals? There were boring parts, such as the weather on D-day and how much new furniture can be polluting, but overall it is astonishingly packed with information, history, art, lore and poetic ways at looking at air. There are tide pool mollusks that breathe water when the wave rolls in and breathe air when the wave rolls out. An isopod lives happily an inch beneath Sahara sands, while a Ruppell’s griffon, a vulture, flies at an altitude of thirty-six thousand feet. The living have succeeded in occupying the entire air, from bottom to top- an area four times as great as all the water in the oceans.- and over the full range of possible climates. If you can breathe there, you can live there. And in that, it is successful.īreath turns place into a habitat. Just getting us to reflect on the importance and busy-ness of air, the indelible essence that surrounds us every day, is probably the aim of a book like this. ![]() But there are multiple others points that could have used a picture if he really wanted to make his point clear.īut in the end, being perfectly clear may not have been his goal. He describes paintings but doesn't reprint any of them, and the chapter really withers without them. The most obvious example is that his chapter on the perception and portrayal of the air in the history of art. And then when he really needs a picture, there isn't one, and his language gets tangled trying to make up for it. ![]() There are a few pictures, but that are largely not helpful to the author to make his point. The chapters form a hodge-podge that eventually becomes a picture, but it's part memoir, part poem, and part science. It's far more a meditation on things having to do with air than a science book. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |