Love and loss, life and death, among the nighttime creatures of the city that never sleeps Like her bestseller "Red-Tails in Love," Marie Winn's "Central Park in the Dark "explores a once-hidden world in a series of interlocking narratives about the extraordinary denizens, human and animal, of an iconic American park. Her beguiling account of a city's lakes and woodlands at night takes the reader through the cycle of seasons as experienced by nocturnal active beasts (raccoons, bats, black skimmers, and sleeping robins among them), insects (moths, wasps, fireflies, crickets), and slugs (in all their unexpected poetical randiness). Winn does not neglect her famous protagonists Pale Male and Lola, the hawks that captivated readers years ago, but this time she adds an exciting narrative about thirty-eight screech owls in Central Park and their lives, loves, and tragedies there.
An eye-popping amount of natural history is packed into this entertaining book--on bird physiology, spiders, sunsets, dragonflies, meteor showers, and the nature of darkness. But the human drama is never forgotten, for Central Park at night boasts a floating population not only of lovers, dog walkers, and policemen but of regulars young and old who, like Winn, hope to unlock the secrets of urban nature. These "night people" are drawn into a peculiar kind of intimacy. While exploring the astonishing variety of wildlife in the city park, they end up revealing more of their inner lives than they expected.
| A Word About Chronology | p. ix |
| Before the Beginning | p. 3 |
| Party-Crashers and Flying Mammals | p. 9 |
| The Ghost of Charles | p. 29 |
| Much Ado About Mothing | p. 61 |
| The Moth Tree | p. 77 |
| Miss Jones, You're Beautiful | p. 99 |
| Slug Sex | p. 121 |
| Birds Asleep | p. 139 |
| Pale Male Asleep | p. 169 |
| The Owls and the Pussycat | p. 185 |
| Little Red and the Big Bad Owl | p. 207 |
| The Rescue Fantasy | p. 231 |
| Unhappy and Happy Endings | p. 265 |
| After the Ending | p. 283 |
| Selected Bibliography | p. 289 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 293 |
| Index | p. 297 |
| Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved. |
ISBN: 9780374120115
ISBN-10: 0374120110
Format:
Hardcover
Language:
English
Number Of Pages: 336
Published: 2nd October 2008
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Dimensions (cm): 21.6 x 14.4
x 2.6
Weight (kg): 0.444