Thomas Jarvela
English Pd.7
12/12/97
Book report
Blood Brook A Naturalist’s Home Ground
Type of book:
Ted Levin, Blood Brook A Naturalist’s Home Ground, Chelsea Green Publishing
Company, 1987. pp. 207.
Brief plot summary:
While Ted Levin stood in his kitchen he looked over a topographical map of the
Blood Brook area. He decided that he would climb Spaulding hill and find Blood Brook.
When he found it he studied the fish and insects living there. When he was done at Blood
Brook he went down to the marsh at the bottom of Blood Brook to go kayaking. He saw a
lot of wildlife when he was there, including muskrats, sunfish, beaver, dragonflies, and
many more insects. He noticed the changes of the marsh from summer to winter.
When he was done kayaking he explored the area in a glider with one of his
friends who was a pilot. They flew over the north end of Lake Fairlee and saw an valley
which was created during the ice age. He discovered that his favorite animal from the ice
age was the mastodon.
As an experiment he and his friend went to Blood Brook and found some
tadpoles. He put them in an aquarium and added a lot of muck and mud from the bottom
of Blood Brook. When he added it the water became opaque. Days later it became
clearer, but it never became totally clear.
(2)
Along with climbing Spaulding hill to find Blood Brook he also climbed Mt.
Washington with his family. The winds were so fierce that day that he lost his hat right
off the top of his head.
Once when he mowed the lawn, he thought of all the crickets and grasshoppers
that were in the lawn. He wanted to mow it so he didn’t lose his view of Blood Brook,
and so it didn’t turn into a young forest.
He explained how he had some rare encounters with black widow spiders. He had
seen them in people’s barns and in the woods around Blood Brook. He had also seen a lot
of different spiders and didn’t mind picking up or touching them.
One day in October he drove down a road into Blood Brook Valley and saw the
many trees changing their color. He said that the animals all had different times to go into
hibernation. The hills, he thought, are the most beautiful things to look at during the fall.
Ted Levin grew up watching Disney movies. He once saw a bee being caught by
two ambush bugs. This reminded him of a cartoon he had seen when he was young of
two bugs that were run over by a truck which they didn’t see.
His house was connected with underline power lines giving it a sense of
remoteness. He went on a plane with some other scientists to visit a power plant up in
Canada. They had a lot of power-saving gadgets that they were going to use on the power
plant to conserve energy.
(3)
Things that I learned:
I learned a lot from this book. I learned that the oldest living thing on earth is a tree that is
over twelve thousand years old. I never knew that scientists had found a frozen carcass of
a mastodon before either. I also learned that the average wind speed on the top of Mt.
Washington is 25.4 miles per hour. The fourth thing I learned was that if you just take a
little bit more time to look at something in nature you will notice and see a lot more
things.
Recommendation:
I wouldn’t recommend this book to anybody, because the whole book is a description of
Blood Brook and nature. Some examples of these descriptions are: “I count three; the rest
must be in the mud, each with its bubble of air from which to breath-an Aqualung of
sorts, that is carried in a reservoir beneath its wing covers.”, “Driving home from Casey’s
day-care center, I pass the largest, most beautiful American elm on Thetford Hill.”, and
“The clouds began to disperse, the sun peeked out, and the wind petered to a more
comfortable twenty miles per hour.”. There is a lot of information in this book and you
would have to really be involved or interested in it to remember all of it. If I were to
suggest this book, I would suggest it to the age group of 14-adult, as it has some difficult
vocabulary.