Word: naturalist
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...Long Island bird watchers. By mid-morning the group had spotted 36 different species, slightly shy of the figure at that hour during the previous year's count. "Not really too good," shrugged Leader Paul Stoutenburgh, 50, a tall, lean, high school teacher and part-time naturalist. "Perhaps we're just not as sharp-eyed as we should be today...
...machines that live for the group and kill only to eat. Instead, they are programmed for selfish, even murderous acts when survival and propagation are threatened. This radical shift in thinking is shown most dramatically by studies of India's sacred monkey, the hanuman langur. In 1965, a naturalist wrote that the long-tailed black and gray langurs were "relaxed" and "nonaggressive." Now, a Harvard researcher has shown that the langur society operates more like the House of Borgia, complete with kidnaping, constant sexual harassment, group battles, abandonment of some wounded young by their mothers, and the regular practice...
...Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady by Edith Holden (Holt, Rinehart & Winston; 186 pages; $14.95). In the England of 1906, when there was less leisure time and no television, Naturalist Edith Holden made almost daily entries in a diary and interspersed among them watercolor paintings of the birds, flowers and grasses she saw on her walks. The result, never before published, was a delicately assembled chronicle of a year in the Midlands that included the diarist's favorite poems and aphorisms. It is published here in a fine facsimile edition that pleases the mind...
...Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Although Darwin did not discuss man in this work, the theory of evolution of species through natural selection suggested that human beings had evolved from some lower form of life. By implying that man was related to apes and monkeys, the great naturalist incurred the derision ?and wrath?of millions round the world. "Descended from apes!'' exclaimed the wife of the Bishop of Worcester when she heard the news in 1860. "Let us hope it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known...
...narrow specializations, Nabokov's genius was being able to see that "there is no science without fancy, and no art without facts." To his naturalist's eye, the world contained a profusion of odd juxtapositions, camouflages and artifices that concealed enchanting truths. A journalist who asked why the genitalia of male butterflies were hooked and serrated like instruments of torture received the following two-word answer: "High winds...