CHAPTER 7: I have no books dealing extensively or even satisfactorily with the world I see through a hand-glass. There may be one, but I have yet to find it.
CHAPTER 8: There are dozens of animal books, good, bad, and awful. Ernest Thompson Seton’s Wild Animals I Have Known (Doubleday) has its merits, especially for youngsters. Familiar Animals of North America, by Will Barker (Harper), is excellent though limited in scope. I frequently turn to two of the textbooks on my shelves, General Zoology, by Tracy I. Storer (McGraw-Hill) and Animal Biology, by Michael F. Guyer (Harper), both of which are more readable than most texts. For night-watchers I recommend The World of Night, by Lorus and Margery Milne (Harper). For animal tracks I find Olaus J. Murie’s A Field Guide to Animal Tracks (Houghton Mifflin) invaluable.
CHAPTER 9: There are hundreds of bird books, good, bad, and impossible. I rely on two guides, A Field Guide to the Birds, by Roger Tory Peterson (Houghton Mifflin), and The Audubon Bird Guide: Eastern Land Birds, by Richard H. Pough (Doubleday). On my shelves is also the comprehensive Birds of North America, edited by T. Gilbert Pearson (Doubleday ). For bird songs I have found A Guide to Bird Songs, by Aretas A. Saunders (Doubleday), outstandingly good. John K. Terres’s Songbirds in Your Garden (Crowell) is sound and sensible.
CHAPTER 10: Why the Weather? by Charles F. Brooks, Eleanor S. Brooks, and John Nelson (Harcourt Brace), is one of my stand-bys. The “Golden Guide” volumes on Weather and Stars (Golden Press) are full of clear, concise information. Two volumes in the Scientific American series of paperbacks, The New Astronomy and The Planet Earth (Simon & Schuster), are excellent.
CHAPTER 11: Two books by Lee R. Dice: Natural Communities and The Biotic Provinces of North America (University of Michigan Press) are unusually worth while. Durward L. Allen’s Our Wildlife Legacy (Funk & Wagnalls) is both provocative and informative. Almost any book by the late Aldo Leopold throws fresh light on this topic; I often pick up his A Sand County Almanac (Oxford) for sheer enjoyment, since Leopold had a poet’s tongue and a crusader’s vigor. The Betty F. Thomson book previously mentioned, The Changing Face of New England, also has much to say in this field.
CHAPTER 12: Weeds, the Muenscher book previously mentioned, has a brief section on useful wild plants. Garden Spice and Wild Pot-Herbs, by Walter C. Muenscher and Myron A. Rice (Cornell University Press), is a big, beautiful, and useful book. Another book packed with material, much of it about the Far West, is Useful Wild Plants of the United States and Canada, by Charles Francis Saunders (McBride). Gray’s Manual of Botany, of course, is a must on any nature reference shelf. I also find The World of Plant Life, a textbook by Clarence J. Hylander (Macmillan), invaluable. As for cookbooks presuming to tell how to cook wild food, there are few that deal with wild plants at all, and most of those that deal with wild game are hopeless. The one exception I will make is Raymond Camp’s Game Cookery (Coward-McCann), which for the most part is sensible and practical. It is the only one I would give shelf space.
CHAPTER 13: The Hylander book I mentioned just above, The World of Plant Life, is valuable here. So is the Muenscher book on Weeds. The Collins Field Guide to American Wild Life, also previously mentioned, has a good, concise section on snakes, both poisonous and harmless.
CHAPTER 14: An Almanac for Moderns, by Donald Culross Peattie (Putnam) deals with the natural year, day by day. John K. Terres’s The Wonders I See (Lippincott) is a naturalist’s chronicle of the year. Rural Free, by Rachel Peden (Knopf) deals with the events of a typical year in the rural Midwest. My own This Hill, This Valley (Simon & Schuster) is about the country year outside the door here in Connecticut.
CHAPTER 15: Most good botany books discuss, or at least explain, taxonomy, the science of naming and classification. Any good biography of Linnaeus is well worth reading; I hesitate to suggest one because most of them are rather dull.
I have intentionally not mentioned many “standard” books by such authors as Thoreau, Audubon, Muir, Burroughs, and many other naturalists and nature writers. Armchair exploration in that field, like actual exploration in the open, should follow the explorer’s bent and provide its own excitement of discovery. I will suggest that recordings of bird songs can be both interesting and useful. My preferences among the recordings I have heard are those of A. A. Allen and P. P. Kellogg: Songbirds of America and American Songbirds, distributed by Cornell University, and those of N. and J. Stillwell: Birdsongs of Dooryard, Field and Forest, distributed by Flicker Records, Old Greenwich, Connecticut.
And I will mention a few periodicals, of which quite a number deal with nature one way or another. Being squeamish, I avoid those that print communications about “birdies,” “beasties,” and pet skunks named Pansy. But Natural History magazine, published by the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and Audubon Magazine, published by the National Audubon Society, are both excellent. Both these organizations, by the way, also publish an assortment of first-rate nature material, most of it for school use but much of it valuable for any nature student, young or old. The Audubon Society’s charts and pamphlets on mosses and lichens, for instance, are the best I have seen anywhere, for any age. Generally speaking, the publications of most museums are worth while.
There are also a number of state and regional publications. I mention two that I consider outstanding. For persons living in the Northeast, The New York State Conservationist, published six times a year by the New York State Conservation Department, is specially valuable. For Midwesterners particularly, but of general interest too, is the modest but excellent The Living Museum, published each month by the Illinois State Museum and edited and largely written by Virginia S. Eifert, an able naturalist and a talented writer.
But even the best books and magazines are essentially no more than a table of contents for the vast volume of material that awaits anyone in the dooryard or just beyond. The big, definitive book about nature is nature itself.
About the Author
Hal Borland (1900–1978) was a nature writer and novelist who produced numerous bestselling books including memoirs and young adult classics, as well as decades of nature writing for the New York Times. Borland considered himself a “natural philosopher,” and he was interested in exploring the way human life was bound to the greater world of plants, animals, and natural processes.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Copyright © 1962 by Hal Borland
Copyright © renewed 1990 by Barbara Dodge Borland
Cover design by Neil Heacox
978-1-4532-3237-8
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Hal Borland, Beyond Your Doorstep
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