Library

Dropped off some books (and dvd Borgen) at my University branch library today and got a few seconds to take this picture with the blossoms before it’s too late.   This neoclassical building was opened in 1910 and is now on the National Register of Historic Places.  In 1998, Seattle voters approved a large “libraries for all” bond and a new central library was built and most branches were renovated, this one completed in 2007.  Seattle is a great book town… probably because of our weather…(our usual weather that is)

The book for our book club today was “Imperial Dreams , Tracking the Imperial Woodpecker through the Wild Sierra Madre, by Tim Gallagher, who is a renowned ornithologist from Cornell Lab of Ornithology.   A different book for us; an adventure story of an obsession to search for this disappearing bird in dangerous high country in Mexico.     I have been on the Copper Canyon train in this exact area, to Chihuahua - in 2002, and saw no AK47s.  Now apparently it’s totally controlled by drug growers and traffickers, 50,000 people have been killed, and I think I would not go there today.  It was a good discussion about our careless use of the environment and its consequences and also about what amount of danger would we endure to seek what kind of  passion.   


HERE is a link to the only known pictures ever taken of this 2 foot long woodpecker taken on an expedition in 1956.   Gallagher followed lots of leads but never saw one…