by Eric Orff
Peter E. Randall Publisher, 2024
At age 4, living with his family in Oklahoma, Eric Orff would spend as much time as he could catching horned toads and tarantulas. “I knew that someday I would work with animals and become a biologist,” he writes.
Later the Orffs moved to Londonderry, New Hampshire, where Eric attended school, met his lifelong friend and fishing partner Rick Hamlett, and pursued what he loved – being outdoors and learning all he could about the critters that lived there. He reveled in tromping the half-mile through the woods and fields behind his house to the Little Cohas Marsh to fish, investigate tracks in the mud, and listen to birds.
What’s Wild: A Half Century of Wisdom from the Woods and Rivers of New England draws on these early experiences, as well as Orff’s three decades working as a biologist for the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department (including as the state’s first bear biologist), and later, 15 years for the National Wildlife Federation. Throughout his career, Orff has also worked to cultivate greater interest in, and respect for, wildlife, through written columns and public presentations. During the covid epidemic, new readers discovered his work through his blog, NH Nature Notes.
Orff’s lively writing, passion for wildlife, and keen observations make this book an enjoyable read. You feel like you’re with him while he’s herding geese to be banded, flying over the Great Bay counting waterfowl, or saving young fish from being chopped up by hydroelectric turbines. Orff writes about wildlife and their habitats as only a person with a lifelong connection to their subject can.
The book is organized into chapters, many of them with humorous titles (“Hello, There Is a Moose in My Swimming Pool”) and several of them recounting misadventures, where humans and other species had different agendas. For example, in “The Slippery Slimy Scary American Eel,” Orff describes his wife’s aversion to eels and a poor decision he made early in his marriage.
While Orff was a student at University of New Hampshire, Hamlett and he checked out a pond near Durham, New Hampshire. The pond was brimming with 3- and 4-inch eels – irresistible bait for bass. They scooped up a bunch in a T-shirt, toted them to Orff’s apartment, and put them in a fish tank.
“When my young bride woke up and got ready to walk to work, she was somewhat startled by the caldron of eels I had left in our living room,” Orff writes. “She was even more startled by their absence in the aquarium when she returned for lunch four hours later. What luck, they had all crawled out! Our lovely apartment had been transformed into a scene from an Alfred Hitchcock movie.”
In a chapter titled “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” Orff describes how, as a child, he had a habit of bringing injured and orphaned animals home, and shares several anecdotes about his experiences rescuing and sometimes rehabilitating wildlife. When he was working for New Hampshire Fish and Game, a person brought an emaciated cock pheasant to the department’s headquarters in Concord. Orff took the bird home and nursed it. When it had regained its strength, he let it go, but the pheasant returned. “Not only did he not leave but he moved right back into the yard and claimed it as his territory,” Orff writes. “He became very belligerent – especially to my 3-year-old son.… For over a week he intimidated my two kids and at one point chased my son right into the house.”
Not all of his columns are humorous, however. For example, in “It’s Duck Season in New Hampshire,” Eric describes his 50-year love affair with wood ducks and how much these birds mean to him: “From the gleaming iridescent head of the drakes to the high-pitched squeal of a hen taking flight, there is just something about wood ducks that stirs my soul.”
If you enjoy the outdoors, chances are What’s Wild will inform and entertain.