Northern Woodlands

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Letters from Eden: A Year at Home, in the Woods

Through the 31 essays that make up Letters from Eden: A Year at Home, in the Woods, author Julie Zickefoose demonstrates how truly at home she is on the 80 acres of forests and fields where she lives.

The book’s title reflects the progression of the seasons, not the gestation period for this book. Indeed, Zickefoose spent about eight years creating the essays, field notes, pencil drawings, and watercolors for this gem. She also shares what she’s learned during decades of dedicated observation, including her years as a field biologist for The Nature Conservancy spent establishing a program to protect piping plovers along the Connecticut shoreline.

In the introduction, New Hampshire’s Sy Montgomery states: “Julie knows where and how to find the dramas that unfold all around us – right here in the real world, the natural world that was our first and, still, our proper home. … ”

Zickefoose has settled in the Appalachian foothills of southeastern Ohio, and she describes what she’s discovered during walks on her land. Few of her encounters are conventional. When she finds a dead possum, she suspects it was killed by a great horned owl, not a coyote. A coyote would have the strength to carry and cache its prey. The next day, eager to solve the whodunit, Zickefoose hurries to find the carcass. It’s gone. In its place, she finds two large, yellowish white splats confirming the presence of a great horned owl. Zickefoose muses: “I realize I am laughing and talking to myself, and I have to laugh again at the thought of a woman moved to rapture by half a possum and two owl droppings.” On a walk along the trail the following day, Zickefoose and her husband see a large owl. “Buffy-fawn below, its wings laced with the same color, it can only be a great horned, the first one we’ve sighted on our land. Not all my wildwood sleuthing ties up so nicely,” she writes.

For better or worse, Zickefoose interacts with life in her backyard Eden. For instance, friends bestowed several second-year bullfrog tadpoles (the species spends two years in “tad” stage) to enliven the 200-gallon pondlet in her water garden. Fourteen months later, Zickefoose discovers that the largest, a male she’s named Fergus, has downed a hummingbird. A few weeks later, when she sees that Fergus is gulping a chipping sparrow (he’s a big, brawny bugger), that’s it. Zickefoose grabs Fergus – the sparrow’s tail feathers sticking out of his mouth – runs into the house, plops him in a big jar, and plans his future.

Zickefoose asks, “Why am I so furious with Fergus? Why do I feel so betrayed? Fergus is just being a frog. … Bullfrogs, I have come to learn, eat birds. Bullfrogs, in fact, eat anything they can cram in their mouths.”

Letters from Eden is more than a collection of essays. From nearly every page springs one of her pencil or watercolor sketches of a bird, mammal, reptile, or plant. Pencil sketches pulse with the freshness of a field study. Notes, jotted on many of these sketches, add immediacy and credibility to her works. Sprinkled through the book are portraits of robins, box turtles, phoebes, bullfrogs, copperheads. Reminiscent of Louis Agassiz Fuertes’s watercolors of animals a century ago, these portraits are rich in detail. Many are laden with attitude.

With this charming collection, those familiar with Zickefoose’s illustrations and columns for Bird Watcher’s Digest will feel they’ve happened on the mother lode. National Public Radio listeners who’ve heard Zickefoose’s commentaries on “All Things Considered” are in store for a twin treat: crisp, lyrical prose paired with art.

Reviewed by Ann Davis

© 2007 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author’s consent.

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The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet’s Memoir of Living Off the Grid

In the old and idiosyncratic genre of wilderness literature, our American masterpiece is Thoreau’s Walden: Or, Life in the Woods.

As with many perennially great books, when people overcome its daunting aura of “edifice” to actually read Walden, they often find the experience fabulously enjoyable. Thoreau combined exceptional poetic resourcefulness with astute political convictions and a seasoned gift for precise ecological detail. His writing also pulses with wit and resonant metaphor.

Contemporary Maine poet Baron Wormser has now published a book that re-approaches the concerns of Walden not in a scholarly fashion but firsthand, testing and weighing the immediate and practical utility of a life in the woods and addressing Thoreau not as a lofty intellectual forebear but as mentor and even peer.

While not a “memoir” really, as the term is mostly used today, Wormser’s book is also not a how-to manual. The Road Washes Out in Spring is a marvelously sensual evocation of the motives and means of one family who took Thoreau’s challenge to heart and spent a couple of decades living at the end of the road, foregoing conveniences such as electricity and harvesting much of their own food and fuel from the land.

Thoreau turned away from “normal” career and family expectations to perch at the margin of his society, from there turning back to scrutinize, contemplate, and speculate. Not “retreating” but shifting vantage points, the poet-exile seeks to see worldly reality and possibility with a fresh acuity impossible amid the mercantile hubbub and courtly intrigues of the city.

Wormser’s book has three themes, entwined – the nature of homesteading, in an era of commodity housing and “real” estate; the nature of poetry, at a time when a poet’s age-old vocation as chronicling bard and shaman seems effaced by self-help frenzies and obsession with celebrities; and the nature of spiritual discipline, where the other two themes are combined, and where the joys and challenges of disciplined meditation are explored as manifestations of home-making and poetic artistry.

Characteristically, Wormser torques the “back-to-the-land” cliché – and the perplexity of urban or suburban relations and friends – by describing his family’s Maine home not as in the middle of nowhere but “in the middle of Elsewhere.” This is surely a poet’s book. His vocabulary can be delightfully erudite and still entirely natural sounding, and his prose is muscular yet always conversational, loping in gait while assiduously probing. He writes with special alacrity of neighbors, woodstoves, splitting mauls, outhouses, and the vagaries of weather across the day and night sky.

On the original title page of Walden the author declaimed, “I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.”

In tone and tempo, Wormser is more akin to owl than rooster. With less bravado and ferocity than Thoreau, but with comparable subtlety and ardor, Baron Wormser has written a beautiful and eloquent reprise to Walden, entirely contemporary and likely to powerfully beguile not only readers who live in the North Woods but also those who decidedly do not, like a friend of mine – a poet and professional exterminator from Jersey City – who told me that The Road Washes Out in Spring is the best book he’s read in years.

Reviewed by Jim Schley

© 2007 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author’s consent.

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Technical Guide to Forest Wildlife Habitat Management

There’s sort of a running gag in the Northern Woodlands office: “Who has the copy of New England Wildlife?” Hardly a week goes by without one of us having to raid another’s desk to nab this essential text. We used to have a number of copies floating around the office, yet all but one seem to have made the journey to our respective “home offices,” leaving just the single, well-thumbed copy.

New England Wildlife: Habitat, Natural History, and Distribution, published in 2001, is the first in a series of three volumes produced by U.S. Forest Service biologists Richard DeGraaf and Mariko Yamasaki. The book describes the natural history (range, habitat requirements, breeding period, food habits) for nearly every terrestrial amphibian, reptile, bird, and mammal in the region, and then places each animal in a matrix of potential habitats, showing where the species is likely to be found during breeding, feeding, and winter.

DeGraaf and Yamasaki teamed up with biologist Anna Lester and silviculturalist William Leak for volume two in the series, Landowner’s Guide to Wildlife Habitat (reviewed in Northern Woodlands in Autumn 2005). The book shows “what the various [silvicultural] treatments look like on the landscape, so landowners can visualize the results and choose methods that best meet their goals. For all options, habitat changes and wildlife responses are provided. Our goal is to enlist private landowners in the stewardship of New England’s forest wildlife.”

Now the foursome has completed the last volume in the trilogy: Technical Guide to Forest Wildlife Habitat Management in New England. Written for the professional forester and land manager, the book goes into much greater detail than volume two and discusses a broad range of habitats, both forested and non-forested, a variety of silvicultural methods based on forest type and wildlife goals, and several “external” issues affecting habitat in New England, such as invasive plants and forest fragmentation.

Professionals may prefer the new volume to the landowner’s guide, while landowners may prefer the latter’s distilled perspective. But if you have a hankering for this sort of thing – wildlife and forestry and our place in the natural order of things – you are likely to find value in all three. But at the very least, don’t miss volume one, New England Wildlife, which should be on the bookshelf of every wildlife enthusiast in the region.

“Everything is connected to everything else” is one of the underpinnings of ecology, and nowhere is this truth more apparent than in the collected knowledge in three books. A second, more explicit message of the trilogy is one that runs increasingly counter to our urban and disconnected view of the natural world: an appeal for management. “New England’s forest and woodlands, taken together, provide a wide range of habitats that still support virtually all the species present before European settlement. In much of the region, however, habitat diversity has declined in recent decades as forests have matured. Young forest and old-field habitats are disappearing. The net result is a change in the region’s wildlife populations favoring forest species while early-successional ones are declining. Declines in wildlife diversity can be reversed but active habitat management, starting now, is required.”

If there’s anything wrong with this trilogy of reference books, it’s their size. Not that there’s too much information or that they’re too technical or too complicated. At a combined 8 pounds and 898 pages, it’s going to be difficult for me to hide them under my coat for the trip to the “home office.” But these books are so worth it, there’s no reason not to try.

Reviewed by Chuck Wooster

© 2007 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author’s consent.