CARRIED ON THE WIND

A journey that begins with a puff of breath demonstrates important scientific concepts.

Aiming, as Mabry explains in her afterword, to explore both our connections with the natural world and chaos theory in operation, this globe-spanning episode starts with a tan-skinned child who lives in Alaska breathing on a puff of dandelion fluff—some of which ends up in a Rufous hummingbird’s nest. Eventually, one of the baby birds grows up and flies away to Central America to pollinate a coral bean flower. One resulting red seed floats over the ocean to a West African beach, where a doodlebug that nibbles on it is later eaten by a hoopoe, and so onward in a chain of natural connections and migrations that ends with a painted lady butterfly settling on the knee of that same, though older, child. Carefully explaining that though these particular encounters are made up, they are rooted in fact, the author pairs nature notes identifying species and locales in slightly smaller type to her measured, simply phrased narrative. Both are set into brightly hued, sharply detailed outdoor scenes that Jones populates with exactly rendered flora and fauna.

Big ideas, delivered with quiet precision.