Welcome to Litsy!

Crossings is an eye-opening and incredibly thorough look at the way the human-created roads are affecting everything from deer populations and monarch butterfly migration in North America, to kangaroo roadkill and orphaned wallabies in New Zealand. Goldfarb lays out ways humans are correcting our mistakes—building land bridges for crossings and planting milkweed for butterflies. Is it enough? Can we do more?
I loved this book!!

I am working on one more non fiction read to wrap up the month.

Did you know that the road systems humans have built interrupt migrations, isolate animals in territories too small for them, kill an impossibly huge number of creatures daily, and pollute soil and waterways?

A main focus of this book is wildlife crossings by underpass, overpass, culvert, even tiny pipes for rodents, and the amount they cut back on road deaths is astounding.

I wasn‘t expecting the section on roads isolating humans.

Excellent!

This informative book presented aspects of roads and infrastructure that impact an area‘s ecology in ways I never even considered. Readable and organized, it changed what I noticed on my drive to mountains on I70 in Colorado. Not the usual ecology book- which made it so enjoyable.

I got my local library card today. I feel like it was a good way to celebrate being here 4 weeks! My one reading goal this year is to #readmyowndamnbooks, but of course I had to check a couple out as well.

Cerulean Sea was on their $1 paperback FOTL shelf, and I couldn‘t resist. I loaned out my original copy and it never came back to me. I‘ll definitely reread it at some point!

Both of the other authors were at #TXBookFest last year 😁.

Readers who enjoyed this book might also enjoy "The Age of Deer" by Erika Howsare.

Very interesting!

I asked Abra how to say "roadkill" in Portuguese. Atropelemento, she said--literally, "run over." Like roadkill, atropelamento had acquired nonliteral significance. "If we have the same goals and I do it faster, you can also say atropelamento," Alba said: one person crushed by another's ambition. It was a word that signified conflict and conquest, thd victory of the strong over the weak, the swift over the slow. It seemed apt.

According to one estimate, cars hit as many as twenty-five million monarch butterflies every year.

According to one analysis, insects are going extinct eight times faster than mammals, reptiles, and birds; per the same study, the world loses 2.5 percent of its insect mass every year.

Reintroducing cougars to the Northeast could prevent 700,000 deer-vehicle collisions and 155 driver deaths over thirty years.

In Costa Rica, jaguars have been lured through underpasses with Obsession, a Calvin Klein perfume that purportedly sets a "sexy, provocative mood."

A more recent estimate roughly doubled those figures to more than 59,000 injuries and 440 deaths.

I live in NYC, so I don't drive. But if I did, I would want someone to cut me off in traffic so that I could call them a flivverboob."

That roads threaten animals is ironic, for it was animals who inscribed the first etchings on the palimpsest that is America's road network. Many of our best-used roads began as wildlife trails--often bulldozed by bison--that solidified into Native American footpaths.

Crossings explore how roads have impacted wildlife as well as what mitigation strategies have been successful. This is such a good book! It could have been super dry, but Goldfarb is such an engaging writer that it gets an enthusiastic 5 ⭐️ rating from me! His previous book Eager, about beavers, is just as good.