Can I read Gulls : A Social History on EtoBox?

Gulls : A Social History by Frank Graham, Jr.; photos. by Christopher Ayers is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Gulls : A Social History about?

This is the story of those marvelously adaptable birds—the gulls—and the most destructive of animals: man. Over the past 150 years man's actions have thrown some species of gulls totally out of context with their world, yet they have managed not only to survive but, for better or worse, to multiply at a rate that matches man's own. Nature fitted the forty-four species of gulls to be efficient predators and scavengers, and for hundreds of years they lived the precarious existence of wild things, foraging along the shore and feeding on birds'eggs and nestlings. When man arrived on the scene, they rapidly learned to follow the fishing boats and even went into the fields to eat the insects turned up by the plow—at one point saving an entire harvest by consuming swarms of grasshoppers. The nineteenth-century craze for plumage on women's fashions nearly extirpated several kinds of gulls from our coasts. At last naturalists and concerned laymen established bird-protection societies to halt the indiscriminate slaughter. Then a new element entered the scene: open garbage dumps. The graceful predators became omnipresent scavengers whose population explosion for a time seemed to have no end;

Author

Frank Graham, Jr.; photos. by Christopher Ayers

Publisher

Random House, Incorporated

Published

2013

Language

EN

ISBN

9780442229207

Subjects

Science, History, Nature