This is a dead-simple iOS pp, whose sole function is to tell you what time the sun rises and sets. It has a scroll wheel in the upper right hand corner you can use to scroll backward and forward to see the sunrise and set times on a given day. It also shows the time until sunset during the day, and the time until sunrise at night, as well as the total hours of sun uptime. You can set it to show moonrise and fall, as well as the phase of the moon. There’s an icon for the current weather, and the highs and lows for your area are displayed as well. It’s not as useful as a full-fledged weather app though, but it does give you a nice idea of what it’s like out there.

I find it useful for knowing when to let my very spoiled pet chickens out of their coop, and getting some idea of when they’ll stop laying for the winter, and start up again in the spring. You can localize it fairly easily. If you are traveling and need to know the various rise and fall times for, say, scenic Ulan Bataar, you touch the map icon and move the pin there. Sure, I can look out the window and find out what’s happening now, but for precise information for other times and places, this app is marvelous. And I can do things like discover when the actual equinox is at my house. Turns out that we get 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of night on March 17th.

This book is an essential guide to how field geology should be practiced. It is simple, clear, and written in a style which is accessible to students and amateurs. Jargon is limited to the irreducible and there is no effort to obfuscate. I have been using this all my professional life of more than 30+ years.

Using this manual and a fairly rudimentary set of basic geologic skills, outcrop and contact geologic maps can be produced, complete with cross-sections. There is no better resource for those interested in learning more about field geology.

[For those interested in a narrative take on American geology, look no further than John McPhee's epic and accessible Annals of the Former World. A worthy read!--OH ]

WeatherSpark is a website that has changed how I look at the weather. Like most other weather sites it provides a local forecast based on a variety of data sources including NOAA (there are international data sources for those outside the US). Unlike some other sites, like Weather Underground or Weather.com, WeatherSpark is built on the idea that the user should control what data is displayed using either real-time data or historical trends.

The user interface, while at times overwhelming in the number of options it provides, is straight forward and very useful. You can quickly expand or reduce your date range from hourly to daily to weekly to monthly and even to years. While this may not seem particularly useful on a daily basis, it is incredibly useful when planning trips and events in the future (and while it won’t predict the weather, the historic trends are useful for having a “best guess” of what the weather will be like).

Not only can you control the timeline, but you can also toggle maps (with radar), text-based weather reports, and climate trends. They offer a plethora of graphed weather variables including dew point, wind direction, precipitation amount, precipitation rate, humidity, sun rise/set, and pressure among others. For those people who just want to know if it’s going to rain, the level of customizability in the data visualization will be overkill. Conversely, this site may not be hardcore enough for weather nerds more interested in data mining than visualization.

For me, WeatherSpark has proven to be a powerful tool, and one I use on a weekly basis to assist my environmental intelligence. I’ve used it to compare precipitation amounts and average night time temperature in multiple locations in order to predict mushroom fruiting patterns (and I imagine if I were a gardener it would be just as indispensable for starting beds). Not only that, but my fiancée and I are now using it to pick a date for our outdoor wedding in Wisconsin in order to minimize the chance of a washout (or heat wave). For those interested in digging a little bit deeper into weather systems, I can’t recommend WeatherSpark strongly enough.

The baskets and fabrics made by birds are as admirable as their feathers. For years I’ve collected bird nests (a few in the image above) without knowing much about them. It took one obsessive Hal Harrison to find and photograph all of the nests and eggs of the birds in North America before I could begin to identify them.

Unfortunately, there is no real taxonomy for nest types, so identification is still a somewhat trial and error visual match. Environmental context — where a nest is found — is a bigger ID factor. But with some sleuthing in this book (two volumes, east and west) I’ve begun to identify species of nests. That has enlarged my appreciation of birds.

Oh, and these catalogs of many hundreds of nests also serves as splendid inspiration for human weavers.

Can you tell the difference between a head of cabbage and a head of lettuce? Then you can safely pick and eat some wild mushrooms. The key is to learn to identify a few easily identifiable delicious species, and then stick with these easy ones for a while. This book does a fantastic job of holding your hand every step of the way. It gives you reliable rules for learning 10 or so yummy and safe mushrooms. I wish I had this book when I was first starting out. It is a great substitute for going out with an expert.

Who can resist the search for alien specimens from space? Most meteorites are small pebbles; they drop all over the planet but are most easily detected in deserts, or in fallen clusters. Finding them requires metal detectors, maps, jeeps, software simulations, chemical analysis, airplane tickets, patience and a lot of luck. The practical lore in this slim how-to manual was previously known only by the close-knit club of professional meteor hunters. As far as I can tell, this is the only book on how to find meteorites; even the web doesn’t contain the useful details this guide does. Its 84 color pages discuss the gear, the techniques, and the logical tricks needed to find and excavate a metallic needle in a geographic haystack.

The author is one of the stars of Meteorite Men, a TV series which documents the adventures of he and his buddy as they hunt for meteorites in exotic photogenic locations around the world. While meteorite hunting is rarefied hobby right now, it is becoming increasingly regulated as it gains in popularity. Meteorites fall to the ground everyday, but statistically the ones you find will be ancient – a fossil in fact, like gems. You need to obey the local laws even though space rocks are just sitting on (or below) the ground waiting to be picked up. The hard part is still finding them, which this guide will help.

This is the all-around best one volume field guide to insects in North America. It employs retouched photographs for the images and includes representative profiles at actual sizes, which are very handy. The most difficult task for a guide like this is helping you find your way through 2,350 pictures of bugs. Its solution is a rough categorization of 13 body types, which are fairly easy to browse visually, so generally we’ve been able to identify most of what we find to the genus level. (Species level identification of an insect often requires more information and a microscope. This book assumes you are doing “naked eye” identification.) It is more up-to-date and comprehensive than other equivalent guides. It is also backpackable and ruggedly made. All-in-all a solid dependable guide to this vast kingdom of life.

Naturalist David Sibley, like Tory Peterson before him, made his reputation painting and annotating birds before expanding to other biological realms. Sibley’s guides to birds and bird behavior (recommended on Cool Tools) are the best all-around guides to the birds of North America. Sibley’s beats out Peterson’s, and the dozens of others published today. Sibley’s newest book, also written and illustrated by him, is the best all-around guide to the trees of North America, again displacing the many other field guides to trees in print.

Sibley’s illustrations are clear, crisp, and accurate. He manages to maintain distinctions in tree types where species get fuzzy, like in the oaks, or firs. His maps are specific. He includes more parts of the tree than most guides — buds, bark, branches, seeds, silhouettes, flowers, cones, etc. — which really help in identification. And he includes not only native trees but many feral varieties, and even widely planted ornamentals. One detail I appreciate: he lists alternative common names to trees, since trees seem to have local names.

With Sibley’s guide I’ve been able to identify more trees than with other guides. However the book is big, not at all pocketable, or the kind of thing you are likely to take with you into the field on a hike. Perhaps future editions might remedy this. I use this quality softcover edition (a delight to browse) by taking samples and photos outside and returning home to identify.

I sent one of these to a friend who lives in Tasmania. She has a wonderful assortment of southern hemispherical birds that she likes to feed and provide water for, but she travels on a regular basis, and the birds empty the bath in a day. She tried various home-brew ideas for automatically filling the bird bath, but none really did the trick for her. Also, this one’s the most aesthetically pleasing I could find, as the reservoir sits separate from the bird bath.

I sent her the KozyFill, she set it all up, fine-tuned the height of the various tubes, and voila! She’s got a yard full of happy Eastern rosellas, wattle birds, the occasional cockatoo, and other sundry birds of the Antipodes. Watching the birds beats TV any morning: you’ve got drama, conflict and humor in dazzling color right outside the bedroom window.