Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo: Migratory Birds and the Impending Ecological Catastrophe

From Booklist In luminous prose, British writer McCarthy addresses the cultural significance of migratory songbirds, from nightingales to turtle doves to the European cuckoo, on the heart and soul. He accompanies ornithologists and bird watchers in the field, and quotes everyone from Keats to Buddy Holly. Shakespeare is here, of course, as well as Chet Baker and The Lord of the Rings. This dance between art and pop culture, from those who have spent a lifetime tracking the routes these small birds take between Europe and Africa to those who wait in their backyards for the birds’ annual returns, is simply divine to read. McCarthy does not assault his readers with fearsome concern; he is much too elegant a writer for that. Instead he makes his case for why these birds matter in a thousand familiar and forgotten ways. Then, finally, he relates the devastating facts about global warming, which causes avian “mistiming,” and other causes of the current migratory species crash. A stunning and profound book that will make readers realize how very much these amazing winged creatures matter. --Colleen Mondor

ASIN

1566638569

Embedding

CLIP ViT-L/14 · 768d

Distance metric

cosine

Doc fetch

3ms·cache hitGET /v2/namespaces/amazon-products/documents/1566638569

How it works

Similar query

34msnearest_to_id → /query

Doc fetch goes through Layer's Aerospike pull-through cache; cache hit served the row without touching turbopuffer. The similar query asks Layer for nearest neighbors of the stored product vector — queries don't go through the doc cache, so no cache header is set.