Scott Weidensaul > Quotes

“Wherever you set foot—on a street in Manhattan as you dodge traffic; on the soft, freshly turned earth of a Hudson Valley farm; on the kelpy tide line below a Maine cottage; or in the pine woods and palmetto thickets of the Carolina Low Country—do not forget that this was once frontier.”
― Scott Weidensaul, The First Frontier: The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery, and Endurance in Early America

“It now appears that birds may visualize the earth’s magnetic field through a form of quantum entanglement, which is just as bizarre as it sounds. Quantum mechanics dictates that two particles, created at the same instant, are linked at the most profound level—that they are, in essence, one thing, and remain “entangled” with each other so that regardless of distance, what affects one instantly affects the other. No wonder the technical term in physics for this effect is “spooky action.” Even Einstein was unsettled by the implications. Theoretically, entanglement occurs even across millions of light-years of space, but what happens within the much smaller scale of a bird’s eye may produce that mysterious ability to use the planetary magnetic field. Scientists now believe that wavelengths of blue light strike a migratory bird’s eye, exciting the entangled electrons in a chemical called cryptochrome. The energy from an incoming photon splits an entangled pair of electrons, knocking one into an adjacent cryptochrome molecule—yet the two particles remain entangled. However minute, the distance between them means the electrons react to the planet’s magnetic field in subtly different ways, creating slightly different chemical reactions in the molecules. Microsecond by microsecond, this palette of varying chemical signals, spread across countless entangled pairs of electrons, apparently builds a map in the bird’s eye of the geomagnetic fields through which it is traveling.”
― Scott Weidensaul, A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds

“It’s happening everywhere; commercial and housing development, along with the road network needed to support it, is the single greatest pressure on natural landscapes in the United States, and by its very pervasiveness the hardest to control. Between 1982 and 1997, developed land in the forty-eight contiguous states increased by 25 million acres—meaning a quarter of all the open land lost since European settlement disappeared in just those fifteen years. This isn’t a trend, it’s a juggernaut, and the worst may be yet to come. At this pace, by 2025 there will be 68 million more rural acres in development, an area about the size of Wyoming, and the total developed land in the United States will stand at a Texas-sized 174 million acres. Already, just the impervious covering we put on the land, the things like roads, sidewalks, and buildings we pave with asphalt or concrete, adds up to an area the size of Ohio.3”
― Scott Weidensaul, Return to Wild America: A Yearlong Search for the Continent's Natural Soul

“Like many diseases, syphilis has become steadily less potent with time, since venereal diseases spread more readily when their carriers do not look like something from a horror movie; carriers with less virulent strains proved with time to be the more effective vectors.”
― Scott Weidensaul, The First Frontier: The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery, and Endurance in Early America

“By the early eighteenth century, however, recognition of racial lines was beginning to crystallize. In Carolina in the late 1600s, the slave-owning immigrants from Barbados already thought in terms of black and white, and it is here that some of the earliest self-references to “white” appear.”
― Scott Weidensaul, The First Frontier: The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery, and Endurance in Early America

“By a.d. 1100, the city of Cahokia, close to modern St. Louis, boasted a four-tier, flat-topped pyramid, which was made of 22 million cubic feet of soil and had a base measuring almost a thousand feet on each side. With a population of fifteen thousand to thirty thousand, Cahokia would have put medieval London to shame. It was the largest city north of Mexico until 1775, when New York finally surpassed it. Yet Cahokia was just one of a number of large urban and ceremonial centers in the same region.”
― Scott Weidensaul, The First Frontier: The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery, and Endurance in Early America

“Unihemispheric sleep, as it’s known, has been documented in marine mammals like dolphins and manatees, which must consciously take and expel each breath. Recently, a somewhat analogous condition has been found in humans as well. Most of us have experienced a poor night’s sleep the first time we stay somewhere new; it’s common enough that sleep scientists refer to it as the first-night effect. Scientists at Brown University and the Georgia Institute of Technology found that under such circumstances, one brain hemisphere remains, if not exactly awake, at least “less-sleeping,” in their words, and more sensitive to stimuli—not fully unihemispheric sleep as birds exhibit it, but a closer match than had been realized.”
― Scott Weidensaul, A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds

“seabird breeding. The three volcanic islands of Tristan da”
― Scott Weidensaul, A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds

“Instead, he sent Céloron with 20 soldiers and officers and 180 Canadian militia of questionable value. They were accompanied by only 30 Abenakis and French Iroquois; the large contingent of Indians expected to join them from Detroit, knowing a lost cause when they saw one, decided they had better things to do.”
― Scott Weidensaul, The First Frontier: The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery, and Endurance in Early America

“sanctuaries,”
― Scott Weidensaul, A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds