Life Along the Delaware Bay focuses on the area as an ecosystem, the horseshoe crab as a keystone species within that system, and the crucial role that the bay plays in the migratory ecology of shorebirds. Lawrence Niles, Joanna Burger, and Amanda Dey examine current efforts to protect the bay and identify new efforts that must take place to ensure it remains an intact ecological system. Over three hundred stunning color photographs and maps capture the beauty and majesty of this unique treasure, one that must be protected for generations to come.
Examines the history of Delaware, from its first inhabitants and the arrival of European settlers to the effect of modern times on its business and government.
Water's Way communicates the beauty and essence of the Chesapeake Bay through photogaphy and prose. Those who know and love the Chesapeake will find the bay they treasure on the pages of Water's Way: Life along the Chesapeake. The story of one of North America's most fascinating regions unfolds through the sensitive photographs and prose of two men who have studied the Chesapeake all their lives. Photographer David W. Harp and writer Tom Horton vividly portray how, as Horton writes, "the edges where land and water meet charm us all, from watermen to watercolorists and beachcombers to duck hunters." Water's Way will guide you to "those rare, hidden nooks of the bay country where nature still appears as glorious and untrammeled as it did a thousand years ago." It will also take you to less hidden, but equally intriguing sites within the Chesapeake's reach as Harp and Horton depict the worlds of both nature and humans. An intimate knowledge of and an unwavering reverence for the bay pervade Water's Way. Harp and Horton are as attuned to the romance that still clings to the Chesapeake as they are to the realities that inspire and threaten it. In a time when the region faces tremendous changes and challenges, Water's Way is neither strident nor sentimental. Rather, it is suffused with the fundamental respect for the bay which Harp and Horton see as key to its survival.
Narrative nonfiction account of the record-setting Delaware River flood of August 18-20, 1955, reads like a thriller. This devastation was caused by rain from hurricanes Connie and Diane, hitting within five days of each other. The flood killed nearly 100 people in PA, NJ & NY, with the highest flood crest recorded on river to date. This is an extremely readable narrative woven from interviews with 100+ survivors & eyewitnesses. With 105 historic photos bringing these events to chilling life, this is the first comprehensive account of a tragic event that changed life in the Delaware Valley forever.
People Saving Their Trees in Hurricane Sandy will raise funds for charities to plant trees in stricken areas. Read inspiring, heartfelt, and heroic stories from people who used the Tree Whispering Storm Prep Whispers to help their trees survive Hurricane Sandy and to empower themselves in the face of disaster.
From one of the world’s leading natural scientists and the acclaimed author of Trilobite!, Life: A Natural History of Four Billion Years of Life on Earth and Dry Storeroom No. 1 comes a fascinating chronicle of life’s history told not through the fossil record but through the stories of organisms that have survived, almost unchanged, throughout time. Evolution, it seems, has not completely obliterated its tracks as more advanced organisms have evolved; the history of life on earth is far older—and odder—than many of us realize. Scattered across the globe, these remarkable plants and animals continue to mark seminal events in geological time. From a moonlit beach in Delaware, where the hardy horseshoe crab shuffles its way to a frenzy of mass mating just as it did 450 million years ago, to the dense rainforests of New Zealand, where the elusive, unprepossessing velvet worm has burrowed deep into rotting timber since before the breakup of the ancient supercontinent, to a stretch of Australian coastline with stromatolite formations that bear witness to the Precambrian dawn, the existence of these survivors offers us a tantalizing glimpse of pivotal points in evolutionary history. These are not “living fossils” but rather a handful of tenacious creatures of days long gone. Written in buoyant, sparkling prose, Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms is a marvelously captivating exploration of the world’s old-timers combining the very best of science writing with an explorer’s sense of adventure and wonder.
In 1631, when the Dutch tried to develop plantation agriculture in the Delaware Valley, the Lenape Indians destroyed the colony of Swanendael and killed its residents. The Natives and Dutch quickly negotiated peace, avoiding an extended war through diplomacy and trade. The Lenapes preserved their political sovereignty for the next fifty years as Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, and English colonists settled the Delaware Valley. The European outposts did not approach the size and strength of those in Virginia, New England, and New Netherland. Even after thousands of Quakers arrived in West New Jersey and Pennsylvania in the late 1670s and '80s, the region successfully avoided war for another seventy-five years. Lenape Country is a sweeping narrative history of the multiethnic society of the Delaware Valley in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. After Swanendael, the Natives, Swedes, and Finns avoided war by focusing on trade and forging strategic alliances in such events as the Dutch conquest, the Mercurius affair, the Long Swede conspiracy, and English attempts to seize land. Drawing on a wide range of sources, author Jean R. Soderlund demonstrates that the hallmarks of Delaware Valley society—commitment to personal freedom, religious liberty, peaceful resolution of conflict, and opposition to hierarchical government—began in the Delaware Valley not with Quaker ideals or the leadership of William Penn but with the Lenape Indians, whose culture played a key role in shaping Delaware Valley society. The first comprehensive account of the Lenape Indians and their encounters with European settlers before Pennsylvania's founding, Lenape Country places Native culture at the center of this part of North America.
Traveling from the Delaware Bay to the Florida Panhandle, this examination is a quest through the natural history and science behind one of nature's oldest and oddest survivors--the horseshoe crab. With ten eyes, five pairs of walking legs, a heart half the length of their bodies, and blood that can save a person's life, horseshoe crabs have been on this planet for 445 million years--since long before the dinosaurs arrived. This book explores their unique biology and sex life, explains their importance to medical science and migratory shorebirds, and introduces readers to the people who are working to study and protect them.
