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Halcyon Journey
In Search of the Belted Kingfisher
Marina Richie
Oregon State University Press, 2022
Winner of the John Burroughs Medal Award for Natural History Writing

More than one hundred species of kingfishers brighten every continent but Antarctica. Not all are fishing birds. They range in size from the African dwarf kingfisher to the laughing kookaburra of Australia. This first book to feature North America’s belted kingfisher is a lyrical story of observation, revelation, and curiosity in the presence of flowing waters.

The kingfisher—also known as the halcyon bird—is linked to the mythic origin of halcyon days, a state of happiness that Marina Richie hopes to find outside her back door in Missoula, Montana. Epiphanies and a citizen science discovery punctuate days tracking a bird that outwits at every turn. The female is more colorful than the male (unusual and puzzling) and the birds’ earthen nest holes are difficult to locate.

While the heart of the drama takes place on Rattlesnake Creek in Missoula, the author’s adventures in search of kingfisher kin on the lower Rio Grande, in South Africa, and in London illuminate her relationships with the birds of Montana. In the quiet of winter, she explores tribal stories of the kingfisher as messenger and helper, pivotal qualities for her quest. For all who love birds or simply seek solace in nature, Halcyon Journey is an inviting introduction to the mythic and mysterious belted kingfisher.
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The Hanford Reach
A Land of Contrasts
Text by Susan Zwinger; Photographs by Skip Smith
University of Arizona Press, 2004
The desert country along the Columbia River is one of the West’s least-known desert places—one that most people don’t even drive through unless they are unusually curious travelers. The Hanford Reach is the last free stretch of the river between the McNary and Priest Rapids Dams, a place boasting a varied landscape of floodplains, wetlands, deserts, orchards—and nuclear reactors. This is not a place that people think to visit. Known primarily for hosting the country’s most toxic nuclear outpost, it is public land that barely exists in public consciousness. But because the Reach has been posted off-limits by the military since 1943, this book offers readers a little-seen glimpse into what the Pacific Northwest’s arid east was like before the postwar boom. Susan Zwinger has kayaked the Columbia through Hanford Reach with scientists and activists who are helping to restore it, and in this book she outlines the geographical extent of the Reach, reviews its history, and takes readers through the terrain by foot, on road, and on the river. Here is a land of dark lava flows and basalt cliffs interspersed throughout subtle, pale shrub-steppe, a table of aridity cut through by one of the country’s most prodigious rivers. Zwinger’s sparkling text, enhanced by Skip Smith’s striking photos, captures the subtleties of the contrasting vistas, just as it makes clear the depth of the radioactive poisoning within the soil and wildlife. We have only just begun to unfold the land’s treasures—petroglyphs, ancient village sites, new species, and geological wonders—and in 2000, President Clinton protected 560 square miles of land as the Hanford Reach National Monument. This book celebrates what is preserved in that buffer zone at the dawn of a new era of environmental responsibility.
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Heart Of The Sound
Marybeth Holleman
University of Utah Press, 2004

"You can’t step in the same river twice—although I once believed I could. I believed that the pieces of my life I had chosen, those I held close to my heart, would, once chosen and held, remain the same."—from the book

How does one recover from disaster? That question is at the heart of Marybeth Holleman’s lyrical, elegiac response to the repercussions of the Exxon Valdez oil spill that devastated Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989. Twining together the destruction of an ecosystem and the disintegration of her marriage, Holleman explores the resiliency of nature—both wild and human—and the ways in which that resiliency is tested. Like the oil that remains pooled beneath rocks years after the tanker spill, the emotional wounds of the past lie just below the surface. Recovery and restoration from the pain wrought by human hands does not come easily.

If much of nature writing is about the heart’s search for an unspoiled, perfect landscape, The Heart of the Sound is about what happens when the return-to-paradise fantasy is over and paradise is lost. In language rich with passion and hard-won insight, Holleman creates a captivating picture of a woman who found her Eden in the sweeping fjords of Alaska only to lose it to ecological tragedy. But somewhere within that loss, she finds herself.

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Heart Stays Country
Meditations from the Southern Flint Hills
Gary Lantz
University of Iowa Press, 2017
Writer and photographer Gary Lantz has always felt most at home in what the Osage used to call the “heart stays” country—the southern edge of the Flint Hills tallgrass prairie in Oklahoma’s Osage County. It’s a place of grassy mounds with lots of rocks underfoot and clusters of crooked little oaks providing shade. It started young, his long-lasting love affair with a landscape that unnerves the uninitiated a little, mostly because it just seems so empty, and it has persisted through his entire life.

As proud grasslanders know, the prairie is biologically fulfilling, unique, and increasingly rare: biologists from the National Park Service and the Nature Conservancy agree that a healthy prairie remains one of the most ecologically diverse and dynamic ecosystems on this planet—as well as one of the rarest left on earth. This landscape that once inspired rapturous exclamations from travelers headed west on horseback now mostly exists in fragments exiled from each other by cropland, cities, and interstate highways.

Historically, tallgrass prairie stretched from Canada to Texas, from central Kansas to Indiana. Now the last major expanse of tallgrass occurs in the Flint Hills, a verdant landscape extending in a north-south strip across eastern Kansas and into northern Oklahoma’s Osage County. In these essays, Gary Lantz brings the beautiful diversity of the prairie home to all of us. 
 
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The Highlands
Critical Resources, Treasured Landscapes
Lathrop, Richard G
Rutgers University Press, 2011

Think of the Highlands as the “backyard” and “backstop” of the Philadelphia–New York–Hartford metroplex. A backyard that spans over three million acres across Pennsylvania, New York, and Connecticut, the Highlands serves as recreational open space for the metroplex’s burgeoning human population. As backstop, Highlands’ watersheds provide a ready source of high-quality drinking water for over fifteen million people.

The Highlands is the first book to examine the natural and cultural landscape of this four-state region, showing how it’s distinctive and why its conservation is vital. Each chapter is written by a different leading researcher and specialist in that field, and introduces readers to another aspect of the Highlands: its geological foundations, its aquifers and watersheds, its forest ecology, its past iron industry.

In the 1800s, the Highlands were mined, cutover, and then largely abandoned. Given time, the forests regenerated, the land healed, and the waters cleared. Increasingly, however, the Highlands are under assault again—polluted runoff contaminating lakes and streams, invasive species choking out the local flora and fauna, exurban sprawl blighting the rural landscape, and climate change threatening the integrity of its ecosystems.

The Highlands makes a compelling case for land use planning and resource management strategies that could help ensure a sustainable future for the region, strategies that could in turn be applied to other landscapes threatened by urbanization across the country. The Highlands are a valuable resource. And now, so is The Highlands.

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Hiking the Escalante
In the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, New Edition
Rudi Lambrechtse
University of Utah Press, 2015
The Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument covers 1.7 million acres in southern Utah, offering the hiker an experience of deep solitude surrounded by a wealth of geological, biological, and archaeological treasures. Hiking the Escalante opens the door to exploration of this highly scenic area of meandering canyons with relatively few marked trails. It lists fifty hikes by degree of difficulty and includes directions to trailheads, instructions for how to follow particular routes, choices of side canyons along the way, suggestions for loop hikes, and occasional alternative endings. A detailed road log will guide you to each of four described sections. Along with hike descriptions, the book provides information on the geology, natural history, and human history of the area. This second edition contains seven new hikes, new photographs, and updated information about hike terrain. 
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Hinduism and Ecology
The Intersection of Earth, Sky, and Water
Christopher Key Chapple
Harvard University Press, 2000

This fourth volume in the series exploring religions and the environment investigates the role of the multifaceted Hindu tradition in the development of greater ecological awareness in India.

The twenty-two contributors ask how traditional concepts of nature in the classical texts might inspire or impede an eco-friendly attitude among modern Hindus, and they describe some grassroots approaches to environmental protection. They look to Gandhian principles of minimal consumption, self-reliance, simplicity, and sustainability. And they explore forests and sacred groves in text and tradition and review the political and religious controversies surrounding India’s sacred river systems.

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Hispaniola
A Photographic Journey through Island Biodiversity, Biodiversidad a Través de un Recorrido Fotográfico
Eladio FernándezForeword by Edward O. WilsonIntroduction by Philippe Bayard, Société Audubon Haïti
Harvard University Press, 2007

First, there is a soft rustle in the underbrush, then a low-slung, utterly bizarre-looking insectivore dashes in front of Eladio Fernández. With a reflexive click of digital shutter, he's captured the reclusive (Solenodon paradoxus--a living fossil. A Dominican-based conservationist and photographer, Fernandez is documenting the efforts of a distinguished team of international scientists as they unravel the workings of evolution being played out on the island of Hispaniola.

A short flight from the Florida coast, Hispaniola offers unique opportunities, not just to photographers like Fernández, but to evolutionary biologists as well. At 40 million years, Hispaniola is far older than the Galápagos. Its considerable age, along with a diversity of habitats--from mountains and cloud forests to savannahs and tropical lowlands--makes this island one of the most spectacular, if poorly understood, troves of biota on the planet. The extraordinary richness of species, much of it endangered and yet to be described, is showcased here in nearly 400 spectacular photographs. The photos are accompanied by essays--in both English and Spanish--that make known the Hispaniolan fungi, plants, and animals by the experts who know them best.

Insights gained from Hispaniola's unique flora and fauna, from its rare orchids to its stunningly beautiful bird life, may enrich our understanding of other, more complex, living systems worldwide. What Fernández captures here so vividly is not just the amazing variety of living creatures that have erupted in evolutionary isolation, but the urgency of scientists racing to give that variety a name before it vanishes.

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History Within
The Science, Culture, and Politics of Bones, Organisms, and Molecules
Marianne Sommer
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Personal genomics services such as 23andMe and Ancestry.com now offer what once was science fiction: the ability to sequence and analyze an individual’s entire genetic code—promising, in some cases, facts about that individual’s ancestry that may have remained otherwise lost. Such services draw on and contribute to the science of human population genetics that attempts to reconstruct the history of humankind, including the origin and movement of specific populations. Is it true, though, that who we are and where we come from is written into the sequence of our genomes? Are genes better documents for determining our histories and identities than fossils or other historical sources?
           
Our interpretation of gene sequences, like our interpretation of other historical evidence, inevitably tells a story laden with political and moral values. Focusing on the work of Henry Fairfield Osborn, Julian Sorell Huxley, and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza in paleoanthropology, evolutionary biology, and human population genetics, History Within asks how the sciences of human origins, whether through the museum, the zoo, or the genetics lab, have shaped our idea of what it means to be human. How have these biologically based histories influenced our ideas about nature, society, and culture? As Marianne Sommer shows, the stories we tell about bones, organisms, and molecules often change the world.
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HOLLOWS, PEEPERS, AND HIGHLANDERS
AN APPALACHIAN MOUNTAIN ECOLOGY
George Constantz
West Virginia University Press, 2004

In this revised and expanded edition of Hollows, Peepers, and Highlanders, author George Constantz, a biologist and naturalist, writes about the beauty and nature of the Appalachian landscape. While the information is scientific in nature, Constantz's accessible descriptions of the adaptation of various organisms to their environment enable the reader to enjoy learning about the Appalachian ecosystem. The book is divided into three sections: "Stage and Theater," "The Players," and "Seasonal Act." Each section sets the scene and describes the events occurring in nature. "Stage and Theatre" is comprised of chapters that describe the origins of the Appalachia region. "The Players" is an interesting and in-depth look into the ecology of animals, such as the mating rituals of different species, and the evolutionary explanation for the adaptation of Appalachian wildlife. The last section, "Seasonal Act," makes note of the changes in Appalachian weather each season and its effect on the inhabitants.

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The House on Ipswich Marsh
Exploring the Natural History of New England
William Sargent
University Press of New England, 2015
In 2003, Bill Sargent bought a big pink house in Ipswich, Massachusetts. His home sits on what is known as the Great Marsh, a fascinating patch of wetland shared by Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Sargent received a grant to study some of the rare and endangered ground-nesting birds that inhabit the public land adjacent to his property. Ipswich Marsh is about these birds, but much else as well. Organized by the seasons of the year, The House on Ipswich Marsh features Sargent’s trademark interplay of information about the natural world, ecology, and politics. In “Spring,” the reader learns about the geological history of the Marsh; the migration patterns of bobolinks; the courtship flights of woodcocks; ticks and Lyme disease; the mating of horseshoe crabs and the underwater arrival of zooplankton, fish eggs, and moon jellyfish. “Summer” introduces plate tectonics and glaciers; sea level rise and glacial rebound; diving at night among lobsters and stone crabs; a day on Crane’s Beach; and a bike trip on Argilla Road. “Autumn” illuminates fishing; the natural and cultural history of Hog Island; harvest time on Appelton Farm; and a Native American Thanksgiving. “Winter” describes the formation of dunes and sandbars; the mating behavior of seals; coyote hunting deer at night; and a late-winter blizzard in which Sargent spies a red-tailed hawk, waiting, like the author, for the return of spring.
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The Hudson
An Illustrated Guide to the Living River
Stephen P. Stanne
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Since 1996, The Hudson: An Illustrated Guide to the Living River has been an essential resource for understanding the full sweep of the great river's natural history and human heritage. This updated third edition includes the latest information about the ongoing fight against pollution and environmental damage to the river, plus vibrant new full-color illustrations showing the plants and wildlife that make this ecosystem so special.
 
This volume gives a detailed account of the Hudson River’s history, including the geological forces that created it, the various peoples who have lived on its banks, and the great works of art it has inspired. It also showcases the many species making a home on this waterway, including the Atlantic sturgeon, the bald eagle, the invasive zebra mussel, and the herons of New York Harbor. Combining both scientific and historical perspectives, this book demonstrates why the Hudson and its valley have been so central to the environmental movement. 
 
As it charts the progress made towards restoring the river ecosystem and the effects of emerging threats like climate change, The Hudson identifies concrete ways that readers can help. To that end, royalties from the sale of this book will go to the non-profit environmental advocacy group Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, Inc.
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The Hudson
An Illustrated Guide to the Living River
Stanne, Stephen P
Rutgers University Press, 2007

The Hudson River is one of the great rivers of the world. Not long ago, it was deeply threatened by pollution. Now it is coming back to life, a river where fish and birds can thrive again, a river valued once more by communities along its shores.

The unique environmental education program on board the sloop, Clearwater, founded by folksinger Pete Seeger, has taught thousands of children and adults to love the river. With this guidebook, Clearwater  teachers bring their wealth of knowledge about the river to a wider audience.

This book covers, for the first time, the full sweep of the river's natural history and human heritage. It introduces you to the Hudson's diversity of plants and wildlife, to the geological forces that created the river, to the people who explored and settled its banks, to the river's enduring place in American history and art, and to the battles waged over its environmental preservation. Its engaging illustrations, maps, and text––distilled from the best research on the Hudson's habitat and history––invite you to explore the river yourself.

Royalties from the sale of this book will support the continued restoration of the river's ecological well-being through the programs of the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, Inc., a nonprofit education and advocacy organization based in Poughkeepsie, New York.

 

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A Hunger for High Country
One Woman’s Journey to the Wild in Yellowstone Country
Susan Marsh
Oregon State University Press, 2014

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Hunting for Frogs on Elston, and Other Tales from Field & Street
Jerry Sullivan
University of Chicago Press, 2004
A selection of savvy observations on urban ecology from one of the Midwest's foremost authorities on the subject, Hunting for Frogs on Elston collects the best of naturalist Jerry Sullivan's weekly Field & Street columns, originally published in the Chicago Reader. Engaging, opinionated, inspiring, and occasionally irreverent, Hunting for Frogs on Elston pays tribute to Chicago's natural history while celebrating one of its greatest champions.

Published in association with the Chicago Wilderness coalition, Hunting for Frogs on Elston comprehensively chronicles Chicagoland's unique urban ecology, from its indigenous prairie and oft-delayed seasons to its urban coyotes and passenger pigeons. In witty, informed prose, Sullivan evokes his adventures netting dog-faced butterflies, hunting rattlesnakes, and watching fireflies mate. Inspired by regional flora and fauna, Sullivan ventures throughout the metropolis and its environs in search of sludge worms, gyrfalcons, and wild onions. In reporting his findings to otherwise oblivious urbanites, Sullivan endeavors to make "alienated, atomized, postmodern people feel at home, connected to something beyond ourselves."

In the sprawling Chicagoland region, where an urban ecosystem teeming with remarkable life evolves between skyscrapers and train tracks, no writer chronicled the delicate balance of nature and industry more vividly than Jerry Sullivan. An homage to the urban ecology Sullivan loved so dearly, Hunting for Frogs on Elston is his fitting legacy as well as a lasting gift to the urban naturalist in us all.
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