Night Life: Nature from Dusk to Dawn

'Night Life' is the result of one of those why-didn't-anybody-think-of-this-before ideas? 'Fear of the the night is natural to our species,' writes Diana Kappel-Smith, but we are definitely in the minority. Thus, if one wants to really know the natural surroundings, it is necessary to check out the dark. One is reminded of the pioneering naturalist Louis Agassiz' remark about his holiday: 'I spent the summer traveling. I got halfway across my backyard.' Kappel-Smith, a translator of Spanish poetry and author of one previous natural history book, 'Wintering,' visited Hawaii, met some veteran University of Hawaii biologists and took them out for a night dive -- their first. Kappel-Smith's simple idea proved powerful. 'Once you've begun to unravel the illusions of the dark, you have to go on.' Of course, although her U.H. biologists had never ventured onto the reef after dark, that doesn't mean nobody had. 'Night Life' only dips a toe in the complexity of animal behavior; its novelty is in a way of looking, not in the presentation of new information. Early on, visiting the Arizona desert during the rainy season and North Dakota in the winter, Kappel-Smith tries too hard to create an arresting phrase, but as she delves deeper into the night, her writing sharpens. By the time she reaches Hawaii, she is capable of describing 'molten lava flowing downhill, flecked with crusty dark like a dragon's tongue' and cave animals as 'knots of ivory.' By the time she returns to her girlhood home in Connecticut, she has relaxed sufficiently to write with great charm of ordinary things, of how she 'can taste the woodland underfoot by the sound of the leaves.' As Agassiz knew, it is not necessary to safari in exotic places to encounter the mysteries of nature. Twenty acres of 'suburban countryside is richer in wildlife than many a chunk of virgin wilderness.'