Hungry Hollow The Story of a Natural Place

Dewdney takes us on a guided journey through Hungry Hollow's many dimensions of time and space - a multifaceted prism through which its present and prehistory, and its worlds large and small, are all refracted. We meet many plants, animals, fungi, and other life forms, guided sometimes by the raccoon called Lotor, sometimes by the biologist Dianne, who is just coming to terms with the real world of biological diversity. We encounter a Hackberry tree whose branches reproduce the taxonomic tree of life; learn how it would look and feel to shrink by stages to the size of an amoeba; watch a toad win the survival lottery; and see the world of Hungry Hollow from the viewpoint of plants, earthworms, rotifers, and even stones. We also learn about the geological forces that molded North America, the kingdoms of life, surface tension, genetics, the strange sex lives of diatoms and bacteria, and how everything is eventually recycled into the molecular building blocks of nature.