Yellowlegs

by John Janovy Jr.

This book details the journey of a sandpiper, a Yellowlegs and follows it from its nesting ground in arctic Canada to its wintering grounds in South America. It also details the adventure of a biologist and how he intermingles with this journey.

Genres: Birds, Nature

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Emeritus Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Nebraska.

Reviews

[Shae Turner · Rating 1 out of 5]

Picked this up in a used bookstore and now it owes me $3

[Nanosynergy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Yellowlegs: A Migration of the Mind was originally published in 1980 by St. Martin's Press, and later issued in trade paperback by Houghton-Mifflin. The author, John Janovy, Jr., is the Varner professor of Biology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Janovy books

This rambling, disorganized book is more a memoir of Janovy’s personal journey to become an ecologist than a book an ecologist writes about a sandpiper. Janovy follows a banded, Lesser Yellowleg (Tringa flavipes) on her migration from her nesting ground in Canada to South America and back. This Yellowleg serves mainly as the vehicle for his ruminations on his life, his career choice, academia, human technology and its impact on the environment (particularly center pivot irrigation and its impact on the plains rivers), the prairies, the Great Plains, Kansas, Oklahoma and the future of the biosphere. The book starts out promising and some passages are even beautiful and thought provoking, but it is a poorly written book in great need of editing.

I recently rediscovered Yellowlegs: A Migration of the Mind on my bookshelf. I probably read it a second time because I had forgotten how badly written it was after nearly 20 years and because I am from the prairies and a lover of their endless horizons – Its spell is on me like a brand./It has marked me for its own. (Level Land by Kenneth Kaufman). However, there are much better books on the subject.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very passionate book about the author's year following "Yellowlegs," a specific lesser yellowlegs with an identification band, from their first encounter on the Platte River to Texas, along with material to fill out a year in the life of the author and the bird. While the writing style was slightly disjointed at times, that was intentional part of the tale and it did take me into the head of the author and the bird. Janovy's passion about the Great Machine that is the Earth and all of the little parts that make it up is evident throughout this book as it educates you on the lesser yellowlegs in an unconventional way. If you enjoy nature, especially the flora and fauna of the Midwest, you will really enjoy this book.

[Ioan Prydderch]

Wish I had the opportunity to spend more time with the text but I blitzed it in little more than two nights which was pretty good going. Janovy writes with a great deal more wit certainly than any other nature writer that I have come across and easily just as much wisdom regarding what to with the Ultimate Machine that is planet earth. The need for holistic thinking as ever is underlined and as Steve says in relation to the Mini Cooper engine: "the first rule of any intelligent tinkering is not to throw away any of the parts."

[Paul Davidson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read this book twice - twenty years apart. Each time the sense of adventure to chase down the elusive sandpiper and the author's commitment to understanding and respecting nature was inspiring. There were a few spots where the superfluous language starts to do grandiose pirouettes, but I still enjoyed the story. I've grown up in the Midwest and Nebraska and the descriptions of the people and the Platte River are spot on. I am not a 'birder' but I would recommend this to anyone who is looking for an adventurous change of pace.

[Cathie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've only read parts of this book, but I know it to be a great text on how he followed the life of Yellowlegs, a sandpiper, in migrations across Nebraska.