Best nature writing? (birds, coyote, wild, Missouri)
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This isn't exactly the same vein, but a very, very interesting, well researched and well written account of life in the Missouri wilderness in the early 1800s would be W. Michael Gear's "The Morning River" and its sequel "Coyote Summer".
Henry Beston was a naturalist and writer, and his book The Outermost House has become a literary classic. The book is about the author’s sojourn in a small isolated cottage (the "Fo’castle") at the end of the dunes on the great beach of Cape Cod. The book is filled with the most evocative descriptions of nature; and in the first edition published in 1928 there are haunting photographs of shipwrecks and seabirds. Of all writers, I think he comes closest to defining man’s place in the natural world. Here some quotes from this wonderful book:
"We need another and wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken a form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren; they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth."
. . .
"During the months that have passed since that September morning some have asked me what understanding of Nature one shapes from so strange a year? I would answer that one’s first appreciation is a sense that creation is still going on, that the creative forces are as great and as active to-day as they have ever been, and that to-morrow’s morning will be as heroic as any of the world. Creation is here and now. So near is man to the creative pageant, so much a part is he of the endless and incredible experiment, that any glimpse he may have will be but the revelation of a moment, a solitary note in a symphony thundering through debatable existences of time. Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science. It is impossible to live without reverence as it is without joy."
. . .
"Whatever attitude to human existence you fashion for yourself, know that it is valid only if it be the shadow of an attitude to Nature. A human life, so often likened to a spectacle upon a stage, is more justly a ritual. The ancient values of dignity, beauty, and poetry which sustain it are of Nature’s inspiration; they are born of the mystery and beauty of the world. Do no dishonour to the earth lest you dishonour the spirit of man. Hold your hands out over the earth as over a flame. To all who love her, who open to her the doors of their veins, she gives of her strength, sustaining them with her own measureless tremor of dark life. Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places. For the gifts of life are the earth’s and they are given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and the dawn seen over the ocean from the beach."
Aldo Leopold was a keen observer of the natural world, and had a gift for expressing his appreciation of it. "A Sand County Almanac" is a pure treasure; I recommend it highly.
Henry Beston was a naturalist and writer, and his book The Outermost House has become a literary classic. The book is about the author’s sojourn in a small isolated cottage (the "Fo’castle") at the end of the dunes on the great beach of Cape Cod. ....
A wonderful book. I first read it in the mid-Sixties and have re-read it twice since then. Surely, one of the great travel/nature books.
A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson, funny and informative
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