Thoreau and the Birds of Concord: A Book Launch with Geoff Wisner

Saturday, May 11, 2024
6 pm
At Thoreau Farm
$15/person to attend in-person event. Registration required.Register for the IN PERSON event at Thoreau Farm

We are delighted to also offer online viewing of this program. $10/person to attend online. Registration required. 

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Just released by Mercer University Press, A Year of Birds is the first collection of Thoreau’s writings on birds to be arranged by the day of the year, emphasizing the relationship of birds with their environment and the spiritual significance of the seasons. With a focus on the town of Concord, A Year of Birds includes unparalleled descriptions of birds ranging from the red-tailed hawk to the whippoorwill. Special sections are devoted to the now-vanished passenger pigeon and to Thoreau’s mysterious “night warbler.”

Geoff Wisner, editor of A Year of Birds, is a board member of the Thoreau Society and the editor of Thoreau’s Wildflowers and Thoreau’s Animals, published by Yale University Press.

Dancing Cockatoos: A Conversation with Marlene Zuk

Thursday, May 23
7 pm
Free Online Event. 
Registration Required.

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Marlene Zuk shares her book Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test: How Behavior Evolves and Why It Matters.

Longlisted for the 2023 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, it is a lively exploration of animal behavior in all its glorious complexity, whether in tiny wasps, lumbering elephants, or ourselves.

Marlene Zuk is Regents Professor of ecology, evolution, and behavior at the University of Minnesota and studies animal sexual behavior and communication. The author of Paleofantasy and Sex on Six Legs, among other works, she lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Vert: Poet Catherine Staples in Conversation with Richard Higgins

Thursday, June 20
7 pm
At Thoreau Farm
$5/ person to attend in person. Registration Required.

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Catherine Staples in conversation with Richard Higgins about the importance of Thoreau in the writing of her newest book of poetry, VERT, which is part elegy, part quest, part paean to the natural world.

Staples grew up in Massachusetts and it’s there, in New England woods, meadows, and Cape Cod coasts, that the loss of her brother plays out as a quest across space and time: from a weathervane in Madison Square Park to a rusty pump in the mountains, from words etched on nineteenth-century glass to the track of skates on the Charles River. Place is at the heart of the transformation of loss. So, too, are myth and the lives of New England’s early naturalists and Transcendentalists. Henry David Thoreau’s narrative echoes and enlarges hers. He, too, lost a brother and found his way by tuning ear, eye, and stride to “the living earth,” a new way of seeing things.

We are delighted to also offer online viewing of this program. Free to attend online. Registration required. 

Register to attend on Zoom