Northern Woodlands

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Wild Neighbors: A Window on Adirondack Wildlife

Perhaps the most striking thing you first notice about the book Wild Neighbors (besides the stunning, full color, close-up portrait of a pileated woodpecker that graces the cover) is its size. The large-format, softbound “book” measures 11 x 13½ inches, and it looks and feels more like an oversize magazine. Which is fitting since this collection of natural history articles was previously published in the bi-monthly magazine, the Adirondack Explorer, between 1998 and 2007. The 80 or so articles are grouped together taxonomically – mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and insects – with mammals and birds accounting for nearly 100 of the book’s 110 pages that are devoted to the essays. The final eight pages introduce the reader to various resources about the Adirondacks, including several books by authors who contributed to the anthology.

The collection includes essays by 25 different authors, including Curt Stager, Edward Kanze, Willem Lange, and Alan Pistorius – names that anyone in the Northeast who enjoys natural history writing should be familiar with. Pistorius penned the lion’s share of the 50 pages on birds, a topic on which he is well-versed, articulate, and entertaining. Yet rediscovering Ed Kanze’s writing after many years was a most welcome experience. Years ago, I lived in southern New England where Kanze wrote a weekly nature column for my local paper. I looked forward to his work every week. His writing is fluid, inviting, and entertaining, yet full of sound science and careful observations. One of my favorite essays in the collection is Kanze’s “Diary of a Mad Snapper,” a series of first-person journal entries, written from a snapping turtle’s perspective, that describe the last few weeks of autumn leading up to hibernation.

While the majority of the essays are natural history pieces, there are a few point-counterpoint articles that present both sides of an issue as well. For example, in response to the question, “Should the state control Champlain cormorants?”, University of Vermont biology professor Dave Capen presents his views in support of such a program, while John M. C. Peterson, a well-known birder and wildlife manager of a Lake Champlain bird sanctuary, offers the counterpoint.

The book is illustrated with a mix of photographs, line drawings, and cartoons that nicely support the prose. The black-and-white photos, many of which are of very high quality, come from a host of local wildlife photographers, including Gerry Lemmo, Jeff Nadler, Gary Randorf, Marie Read, and others. The detailed line drawings were done by Mike Storey, while the light-hearted cartoons were provided by Jerry Russell.

While the writing is excellent and features a wealth of up-to-date information that any nature lover would enjoy, I can’t quite get past the presentation. Despite its full-color, glossy cover, the inside is printed on newsprint, and the “atlas size” format is clumsy and difficult to put on a night stand, bookshelf, or to carry along on a trip. Also, I would have welcomed biographical information about the authors. Despite these shortcomings, Wild Neighbors: A Window on Adirondack Wildlife is a fine collection of natural history writing that will appeal to many well beyond the borders of the Adirondack Park.

Available directly from the publisher, Adirondack Explorer.

Reviewed by Steve Faccio

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

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Tight Lines: Ten Years of the Yale Anglers’ Journal

This anthology brings together stories, essays, and poems from 42 remarkably diverse authors, from trout-fishing notables Ernest Schwiebert and Robert Behnke to poets John Hollander and W. B Yeats. With attractive illustrations by James Prosek, the book has something for both the avid fisherman and the reader for whom the pursuit may seem a bit odd. As Nick Lyons points out in the forward, the authors lean more toward “literature” than toward “how to” or “where to.”

For this reader, Tight Lines’ most compelling essays express the powerful allure of water. In “Jetties,” Tim Weed (a past contributor to Northern Woodlands) reflects on wading along the Atlantic’s rocky, seething shoreline for stripers amid crashing waves: “Why am I still out here? It’s not only the possibility of catching a big fish. There’s something sublime about this, a terrible beauty in the moment. The greens of the water, the yellows and rusty browns of the seaweed, the luminescence of light and shadow playing on the curling rips. And I’m part of it…playing an active role, probing for the living, pulsing heart of the ocean.” Such vivid imagery abounds in Tight Lines.

In “Fishing with My Daddy,” Jimmy Carter recalls a trip to one of his father’s favorite fishing spots on the Little Satilla River, “a serpentine stream in the flattest part of Georgia’s coastal plain.” This “fish that got away” story includes an experience with his father that led him to write some 50 years later that “many of the most highly publicized events of my presidency are not nearly as memorable or significant in my life as fishing with my daddy [on that day] when I was a boy.”

Any good fishing anthology ought to include some hard facts about the sport, and in his essay “Amare O Pesar,” Howell Raines playfully dispels one of the more common myths about the sport, that “women just don’t get it.” Howell writes that, despite some male revisionism, all fishing writing “stems from Dame Juliana Berners and The Treatise of Fishing with an Angle, published in 1496.” Hers were the first instructions on fly-tying in Britain. He notes also that the first person to make flies based on the study of nymphs in a home aquarium was Sara McBride, who wrote about her experiments in 1876, well before Theodore Gordon, the so-called father of American fly-fishing even caught his first brown trout. But Raines then reinforces another stereotype by claiming that the reason that fishing becomes an addiction for men more than women is “that men are generally more susceptible than women to obsessions with inconsequential pursuits.”

Evidence that women are not immune from the fishing addiction can be found, however, in “Birth of an Angler.” Newly acclimated to the world of fly-fishing, Christine Hemp writes, “My fly-rod has become part of me, its reflex an extension of my limbs. Each delicate flip of the line, each jiggle to dance the hopper upstream, ties me closer to the world of marmots and jays, and to a balance I’ve only begun to comprehend. I am shocked when, every time I feel the rush of a trout on the line…an unfamiliar elation washes through my body. I am being carried by a river inside me.” Such moments of awakening and awareness help convey the connection anglers feel to the natural world. The act of casting a fly to a cutthroat on the Rio Grande is, for Hemp, transcendent, almost spiritual.

James Prosek, who co-founded the Journal during his junior year at Yale, remarks in the preface, “it’s the contemplative nature of angling that prompts people to write about it. Fishing is mostly about time spent in silence and it provides a chance to think about family, friends, what’s going on in one’s life, nature, art and writing stories. Fishing is really a catalyst for sharing what you’re working out, or to simply tell a good tale.” While fishing may be the catalyst, these stories are ultimately about much more. From a reflection on the meaning of friendship, to a wistful recollection of a near-death experience involving a hippo and a Daredevil, to a scholarly “Fishing Talk” at Yale University, there’s something here for not only those who fish but also for those who wonder what all the fuss is about.

Reviewed by Ray Chapin

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

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The Snoring Bird: My Family’s Journey through a Century of Biology

“Nature is a magic show of the highest order,” writes Bernd Heinrich in The Snoring Bird, his very seductive personal narrative. “I can hardly think of a greater grandeur and satisfaction than the process of finding out, and ultimately understanding, how life really works.”

In this, his 13th book, Heinrich captures multiple genres – biography, autobiography, twentieth-century history – and the evolving history of biology and its impact on his immediate family. In lyrical prose, he tells of his wanderings through the woods, beginning with his earliest years on Borowke, his family’s decades-old farming estate in rural Poland, to the forests of Germany, Africa, Indonesia, and Maine.

The Heinrich family’s affluent life on their Polish farm ended in the aftermath of World War II. Fleeing the advancing Russian army, the Heinrichs would live for five hardscrabble years in a small hut in the forest of Hahnheide, Germany, until they were able to emigrate to the U.S.

Heinrich was 11 when his family arrived in America. Their life as refugees did not dim the young Heinrich’s excitement at “the prospect of new beginnings in the land of hummingbirds, rattlesnakes, Indians, and skyscrapers.” Hayfields, old barns, and the outdoor world were places masked in mystery and full of biological discoveries, from insects to snakes, both of which he collected with enthusiasm (the snakes kept in a terrarium at the foot of his bed).

Gerd, Heinrich’s father, was an ardent, prolific letter writer, continually in contact with naturalist colleagues as he pleaded for financial support for expeditions that would take him and Bernd’s mother away from their children for years at a time. Bernd’s later discovery of a trove of his father’s papers in the hayloft of his mother’s barn lead to the dynamic portrait of his father painted in this book.

Gerd Heinrich was a man of chaotic whims, self-centered, obsessed by his worldwide search for and classification of ichneumons, a large family of wasps. On his expeditions, he also provided museums with specimens of plants and animals, especially birds, which his taxidermist wife and her sister prepared for shipment.

The detailed delineation of Gerd’s preoccupied focus on his biologic studies and writings became part of his son’s early, alert, questioning mind. Although he often disagreed with his father, the instinct towards exactness in biologic studies became part of his own research. He would mature, investigating and writing intense personal books on such diverse subjects as insects, bumblebees, geese, ravens, trees, and running – another of his infatuations.

When home, Gerd Heinrich was an avid storyteller, relating to his children the joys of finding a new species or the dangers of daily life working in the tropics, “a world inhabited by entrancing birds and butterflies.” However, “no story,” Bernd tells us, “was as gripping as that of the snoring bird, a species of ground-living jungle rail in Indonesia that had been thought to be extinct.” Heinrich takes his title from his father’s 1932 treatise on this bird.

This is, after all, the story of Gerd Heinrich, the charismatic, self-absorbed, often heartless philanderer, who nevertheless emerges in this portrait as magnificent in his single-minded toughness. “Despite my resistance to him,” Bernd writes, “he instilled in me the mind and values of a naturalist: to be open to all possibilities, to be a close and careful observer, to discipline my interpretations with facts, and to work hard at my passions so that they might bear fruit.”

Reviewed by Hannah Merker

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