A Man for All Species: The Remarkable Adventures of an Animal Lover and Expert Pet Keeper
288
A Man for All Species: The Remarkable Adventures of an Animal Lover and Expert Pet Keeper
288eBook
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Overview
In A Man for All Species, animal expert Marc Morrone weaves thrilling, inspiring, strange, and often hilarious experiences with practical advice gleaned over his forty-year career, revealing a world of adventure and anguish, humor and heart, that every pet owner and animal lover will recognize.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780307589668 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Crown Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 04/20/2010 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Sales rank: | 867,575 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
www.parrotsoftheworld.com
NANCY ELLIS-BELL is the author of The Parrot Who Thought She Was a Dog, which was named one of the Top 5 Nonfiction Books of the Year by the Richmond Times-Dispatch as well as one of the Top 10 Sci-Tech Books of 2008 by Booklist. She is a literary agent and lives in California with her husband, Kerry, and their menagerie of cats, dogs, and birds.
www.thebarkingparrot.com
Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
Tiny Bones, Big Dreams
Long Beach, New York, in the 1960s was paradise for a child like me. Even though our house was small and there was no backyard, it was only a short walk to reach the empty lot at the end of the block, an empty lot that became my laboratory for the natural world.
The vacant lot was overgrown with ragweed, briars, and poison ivy. There were also stands of milkweed and every stem had the caterpillar of a monarch butterfly clinging to it. I’d carry several of the caterpillars home to watch the chrysalis develop. Whenever I could be, I was down in that lot, catching every kind of insect I could find. Grasshoppers were one of my favorites because of how their mandibles worked. My maternal grandfather, Arnold, was proud of my bug collecting, and also that I knew what “mandible” meant. I had been reading since I was four, mostly The Audubon
Nature Encyclopedia, and I always wanted to use the right word. My mother had bought me the books when she recognized my passion for bugs and other animals. My father was very quiet most of the time, but I knew he understood how important all creatures were in my life. But the most directly involved and expressive was definitely my grandfather.
“It’s not big enough, Marc, not big enough.”
He looked at the grasshopper I had caught and encouraged me to find an even bigger one. Some of the grasshoppers I caught were actually locusts and could fly, so I had a butterfly net to help. Off I went again in search of an even bigger bug.
On this occasion, I hit the jumping jackpot. I had walked behind the house, where I found the biggest grasshopper I had ever seen. It was enormous, at least three inches long, and it didn’t have any wings. I crept up to it and grabbed it. Grandpa would be really proud of this one.
“Grandpa, look what I found!”
I could tell by the way he looked at my prize that it was indeed an excellent specimen.
“That’s a big one, Marc. I can use that one to make my drawings.”
My grandfather created the models for the Welch Biological Supply Company, and he worked from models based on real-life specimens. The grasshopper I had caught would enable him to capture the tiny details when he made his resin model. I was very proud of my contribution to his work.
There were some bugs I was never able to catch for him. He wanted a praying mantis, and I looked hard to find one. When I finally did find a mantis sitting on a branch, I was so mesmerized by it I couldn’t move. The mantis turned its head toward me and just stared at me while it cleaned its front legs like a cat. It was like watching an alien life force. I was so fascinated by the way it looked that I didn’t try to catch it. Another bug Grandpa wanted was a dragonfly, but I was terrified of those. They, too, were fascinating to watch, but someone had told me that they were like darning needles; if you grabbed one it would bite. It took me years to learn that this was false.
That may have been an old wives’ tale; but the puffer- fish bite was a reality.
More than almost anything else, my grandfather loved fishing, and I was his constant companion on those outings. He kept his bait in the refrigerator drawer, usually live eels. Other times we’d dig with our pitchforks in the sand to find the best worms. Fishing with my grandfather wasn’t just about fishing; it was about his sharing his knowledge of all living things. He knew how things worked, how legs worked, how mouths worked, and why they worked the way they did. He was a walking encyclopedia. Hanging out with him, I saw everything in living detail. I saw “how” worms and sand crabs buried themselves in the sand. I saw “how” birds dove underwater to catch fish. If I couldn’t see “how” crabs were able to scuttle from side to side, my grandfather would explain it to me. If the crab was a female, and she was carry ing eggs underneath her body, he explained why we had to let her go so that we would have more crabs the following year. I was always learning, learning, learning.
Except for the puffer fish.
We caught it by accident, and my grandfather put it in a bucket by itself.
“Don’t touch it, Marc. Those fish have sharp, sharp teeth because of the crabs and shrimps they eat.”
I looked at the fish and thought how remarkable it looked. Maybe just a little poke.
I screamed. The bite really hurt, not only because of the sharp teeth, but also because of my grandfather’s sharp words. He explained again how those teeth worked. I truly felt like a hapless shrimp.
Our fishing expeditions were full of explanations and demonstrations. He “showed” me how a sea robin used its unusual fins by capturing one of the fish and putting it in one of his buckets. He “showed” me how the stinger works on a stingray we caught. He “showed” me how the flounder’s two eyes move from the side of its head up to the top. When I was with my grandfather, I lived in a world of magic made real.
Away from the ocean and back in my neighborhood, my favorite captures were crickets, most of which I found in empty beer bottles and soda cans. I watched endlessly to understand more about them. I even fed them Cheerios so that I could observe how their mouths worked when they ate. The cricket has four jaws: one going to the right, one going to the left, one going up, and one going down. Like a little scientist, I studied how all four parts of the mouth moved up and down on the Cheerio. It was so rhythmic and precise. I also studied how their wings moved in order to make noise. If I had any questions, I went to the encyclopedia my mother had bought for me. Those books also taught me that when the female cricket breeds, she sticks her ovipositor directly into the soil. The crickets I caught lived in little jars in my bedroom, so they were always close at hand for observation.
Most children wake up in the morning to a room filled with toys and trinkets. I woke up to hundreds of eyes and thousands of legs.
Table of Contents
Foreword Martha Stewart xi
A Word Jim Fowler xiii
Preface xvii
Part 1 A Pet Keeper is Born
Chapter 1 Tiny Bones, Big Dreams 3
Chapter 2 Big Bones, Small Business 11
Chapter 3 A Store Is Born 18
Chapter 4 Harry and the Hyacinth Heist 23
Chapter 5 The Secret Life of "Flap-Flap" 29
Chapter 6 A Passion for Birds: From Front Porch to Penthouse 38
Chapter 7 The Power of the Stoop: Flying with Falcons 46
Part II A Pet in Every Port
Chapter 8 Passports for Pooches and Pets 61
Chapter 9 Porcupines Arriving at Gate 9 69
Chapter 10 All Ferrets Aboard! 72
Chapter 11 Splash! 79
Chapter 12 Will Park Your Pigeons … and Your Car 84
Chapter 13 He Knows Why the Caged Bird Sings 88
Chapter 14 Passover Pets 92
Part III Adventures in Pet Keeping
Chapter 15 A Typical Day in the Not-So-Typical Life of the Pet Keeper 101
Chapter 16 Betta Than a Kissing Gourami 106
Chapter 17 The "Great Mother" of All Hamsters 114
Chapter 18 A Giant Rabbit Called Harvey 121
Chapter 19 Puff, the Magic Iguana 127
Chapter 20 For Emily, Wherever I Hope to Find Her 135
Chapter 21 Dances with "Real" Wolves 143
Chapter 22 What Has Spots Like a Leopard but Isn't a Leopard? 150
Chapter 23 Domestic Partners 156
Chapter 24 Smiley, the One-Toothed Monkey 162
Chapter 25 Into My Arms, into My Heart: Georgette the Baboon 168
Chapter 26 Baby on Board: Sweet Jessie 171
Chapter 27 Pigs in Paradise, Not in Your Living Room 174
Chapter 28 Prairie Dogs and the Epidemic of Fear 179
Part IV On the Air with Martha Stewart
Chapter 29 Discovered! 189
Chapter 30 Elmo and the Great Goldfish Caper 196
Chapter 31 Taping with Martha 203
Chapter 32 When Lilacs Last Bloomed in Martha's Garden 208
Chapter 33 From Dancing with the Stars to Standing with the Losers 217
Chapter 34 The Baby Bird Heist 222
Part V Animals in the Spotlight
Chapter 35 A Dancing Raven Performs at Lincoln Center 229
Chapter 36 Behind the Scenes with Animal Trainers 232
Chapter 37 Beware the Chimpanzee with a Toothbrush in His Hand 237
Chapter 38 The Zoo Puzzle: Where Have All the Tigers Gone? 241
Chapter 39 Circus Secrets and the Saga of Siegfried and Roy 250
Chapter 40 The Pantheon of Animal "Deities" 254
Chapter 41 Vision of a Pet Keeper 261
Afterword 267
Acknowledgments 269