Category: Discoveries – Books

It is mid-January and here at the Jurica-Suchy Nature Museum, the outside temperatures are hovering around zero, making this an excellent time of the year to curl up under an afghan, with a cup of hot tea and explore natural history from the comfort of home.  Below are a few book and blog suggestions, some old and some new, but all are entertaining opportunities to learn from.

The Backyard Bird Chronicles, by Amy Tan, was just published in 2024, and it is a wonderful look into the daily lives of birds and the species they interact with.  Many of Tan’s journal pages are reproduced throughout this volume where she shares an insightful array of observations of bird behavior.  She has a drawing or two on each page to capture the central action and includes notes on what she is watching, while adding questions to her journal that can be reread to learn more.  She also includes many of her beautiful and intricate watercolor paintings of birds.

Handbook of Nature Study, written by Anna Botsford Comstock over a hundred years ago, was first published in 1911.  She writes in the style used by many teachers: stating a lesson goal, a suggested method to teach the information, and a list of well thought-out questions that help direct the student.  I found it easy to add several of my own questions and answers to the basic information presented in each lesson.  The book begins with a detailed discussion on tools and nature journals that can be used in the field.  Comstock covers a wide range of natural history topics including all of the major plant and animal groups, geology, climate, weather, and the night skies.

The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, by Edith Holden, was written in 1906.  It is a delightful account of Holden’s observations of plants, animals, and general nature taken while walking or riding in the areas surrounding her home in the English countryside.  Holden’s watercolor drawings are beautiful with bright colors and exquisite details.  In the back of her journal, she lists the plants and birds from her observations, with not only the common name in use at the time, but also the genus and species.  While not a book meant for fieldwork, it provides pleasant reading for many evenings.

Books are wonderful, and I have hundreds more in our collection, but blogs and podcasts can also provide a wealth of information and learning opportunities and are quite easy to access.  There are many to choose from (and thank you to all of my readers!) –here are a few of my favorites.

Tuesdays In The Tallgrass, by Cindy Crosby, is a weekly trip through the prairies and meadows of northern Illinois.  Crosby stewards several prairies including the Schulenberg Prairie, Nachusa Grasslands, and her own backyard.  She takes the reader along on her travels in these sites and many more natural areas through her photos.  Relating her observations of the weekly changes, her blog provides a wonderful chronicle of what is happening over time in an area encompassing both wild and urban communities.   https://tuesdaysinthetallgrass.wordpress.com/

The podcast, A Way To Garden, by organic gardener Margaret Roach, presents information on how to care for and enjoy a garden, learning about its inhabitants and other parts of nature that a garden provides habitat for.   Each podcast is an interview with an expert on a chosen topic.  Some of her past podcasts include handling invasives with Daniel Weitoish of Cornell Botanic Gardens, birds in winter with David Sibley, and journaling bird observations with Joan E. Strassmann.  The podcast can be read or listened to, taking a look at nature through the perspective of a gardener, with lively and entertaining discussions.  https://awaytogarden.com/

A Botanist’s Field Notes, by Andrew Hipp, takes us along on his periodic walks through some of the natural areas in northern Illinois.  His experience and knowledge of the plants in this region is profound, and it shows in the depth and detail of each entry.  Hipp includes his observations of the flora and fauna encountered during every season of the year, and he provides a wonderful insight into the ecology encompassed by each short walk.  https://botanistsfieldnotes.com/

The blogs I have shared are all quite entertaining, easy to learn from, packed with detail, and short enough to comfortably browse in a limited amount of time or spend an entire evening by reading/listening to additional topics.  The books I highlighted are some of my favorites, easy to read as a whole story or to pick individual entries from and enjoy a free hour.  While the weather here in northern Illinois is keeping most of us indoors at times, we can find some fun ways to learn.

My shelves are filled with natural history books.  Some are field guides, some provide activities, and some are essays, fun to read and learn about.  Here are some natural history suggestions for your enjoyment in each of five categories: urban/suburban wildlife, illustrated tales, bees, explorations, and memoirs.

Urban/suburban wildlife books include stories close to home.  Going Wild, by Robert Winkler, is an adventurist’s tale of bird watching for urban dwellers, without leaving their home neighborhoods.  Cities everywhere have areas to visit away from structures and the everyday life of humans that host large varieties of birds.  Winkler provides a fun account of his many bird encounters and observations in his backyard and surrounding habitats.  For The Love of Birds, by Kay Charter, is a series of tales from a master birder and storyteller.  Kay relates not only her observations in the field, but what she has learned about birds through various interactions with different species and habitats.  In Hunting for Frogs on Elston, Jerry Sullivan provides a humorous and informative insight to our interactions with the lives of wildlife species sharing the big city.

Illustrated tales are natural history essays enhanced by beautiful artwork by artists.  Letters From Eden, by Julie Zickefoose, follows nature through the year in the fields and woods around her home in Ohio, lushly illustrated with pencil and watercolor sketches.  A Blessing of Toads, by Sharon Lovejoy, is a collection of essays about gardening and other botanic endeavors on both coasts of the U.S..  Sharon includes many simple drawings that illustrate the finer points of each story.  The Wild Remedy, by Emma Mitchell, is a collection of photos and drawings from the countryside surrounding her Cambridge home.  The accompanying essays provide natural history facts and personal reflections from the author as well as her struggles with mental health over a lifetime.  The Comfort of Crows, by Margaret Renkl, is a week to week account of the plants and animals surrounding her backyard home in Nashville.  Hand-drawn watercolors panels  illustrate the many nature aspects of each week.

Dave Goulson has written a two-volume set, A Sting In The Tale, along with the companion volume, A Buzz in the Meadow, providing an in-depth look into the natural history of bumblebees.  He is the founder of the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, an organization dedicated to learning, teaching, and conserving bee populations in the United Kingdom.  The first volume covers the natural history of short hair bumblebees, once native to the United Kingdom, but now found only in New Zealand, and his work to re-introduce them back into the U.K.  The second volume is a story of his efforts to study and learn about bees by buying a farm in France to raise bumblebees.  He covers many facets of bee life with a lyrical style of writing, spinning a wonderful tale of a lifetime spent following a passion.

Peter Wohlleben has written three volumes of essays based on his personal observations of plants and animals in a variety of habitats from his home and the surrounding woodlands of Germany.  The Hidden Life of Trees shares discoveries about how trees communicate with each other and influence woodland habitats.  The Inner Life of Animals are essays based on Wohlleben’s observations of how various animal species interact with their own habitats.  They  make decisions on how to stay healthy, raise a family, and find good places to live, just as we do.  The Secret Wisdom of Nature encompass the first two volumes along with aspects of habitats that influence all the species living in them.  Read as a trilogy, these volumes provide oodles of natural history information laced with ideas and thoughts to help each of us expand our own observational studies.

Memoirs are stories about each author’s life experiences with natural history.  In Nature On The Doorstep,  Angela E. Douglas writes a letter every few days to her family back home in the U.K. relating observations made in her new home and garden in New York.  Readers may particularly enjoy the translations between words and names in two versions of the English language.  Naturalist, by Edward O. Wilson, describes his early childhood as a boy exploring nature and how that brought him to a life-long career as one of our leading nature scientists.  My Family and the Other Animals, by Gerald Durrell, is another wonderfully detailed insight into a childhood spent exploring nature in a new location.  Chasing Dragonflies, by Cindy Crosby, provides an in-depth look into her favorite hobby: monitoring, studying, and involving others in her quest to learn about dragonflies and damselflies.

These books provide stories, insights, and ideas for you to pursue as the summer season begins to heat up.  Find one for yourself or consider a gift book for a friend who loves nature.  If you have books that you have found to be insightful and interesting, or have started you on a new journey, consider sharing them in the comments section for this blog.  Have fun reading!

Field guides are special books.  Lots of them fit in your pocket and can be used out in the field to identify  particular plants or animals.  Field guides come in several formats, and address aspects of nature using differing methods.  Let’s take a look at a selection of these and how we might use them.

Traditional field guides contain a list of all the species within a class such as mammals, birds, or insects.  If the class is very large, a guide may only contain species from one or more orders.  There are  thousands of species of insects, but this class can be broken down into many manageable  orders such as bees, dragonflies, beetles, and more.  Guides provide information on names, field marks, range maps, habitat, food, reproduction, predation and impacts from/to humans.  The arrangement of information within a field guide can be based on one or more identifying characteristics such as color, field marks, taxonomy, habitat, or a unique feature, i.e. number of petals.  Many guides use a dichotomous key, an identification method that asks a series of questions and offers two choices for each answer, eventually leading to a single organism.

Several traditional field guides are issued as parts of series intended to cover a wide variety of life in specific geographic areas.   General guides include Peterson’s Field Guides series; The Audubon Society series, and North Woods Naturalist series.  Pocket-size field guides are limited to only a select group of species within a class or order, usually the most common ones that are likely to be found.  Some that may be of interest include Birds of Illinois by Stan Tekiela; Kaufman Field Guide to Birds of North America, and the Golden Nature Guides.  Other series take several books to cover only one class of animal.  Examples of these guides include The Sibley Guides, Stokes Field Guides, and The Crossley Guides, all of which include multiple volumes about birds.

Nontraditional field guides teach us about nature by using a descriptive element applied to a group of species.  Consider some of the following:

• Guides by habitat – Peterson’s Eastern Forests; The Book of Field and Roadside by John Eastman; Discover Nature in Water & Wetlands by Elizabeth P. Lawlor
• Guides by characteristic – Peterson’s Eastern Birds’ Nests; Pollinators of Native Plants by Heather Holm; Tracks & Signs of Insects and Other Invertebrates by Charley Eiseman and Noah Charney
• Guides by geographic region – INHS Field Guide to Reptiles & Amphibians of Illinois; North Woods Naturalis Series; Trees of Illinois by Linda Kershaw; Flora of the Chicago Region by Gerould Wilhelm and Laura Rericha

The latest technology in field guides is to have information and search capabilities using an app on your phone or tablet that you can carry with you.  Three of my favorites include Seek by iNaturalist for plant and animal identification; Merlin Bird ID by Cornell Lab of Ornithology for bird identification; and SkyView by Terminal Eleven for stargazing at night.  All of these let you use the camera on your device to take a picture to identify the object or view.  Follow-up questions are included to help refine your ID and provide you with additional information.

For those of you who like to keep it simple, consider making your own field guide.  Start with a nature coloring book or a blank sketchpad.  Do your own drawings, colorings, and field notes.  This type of field guide accumulates extensive information over the years and becomes a treasured source for descriptions and notes on your own personal interaction with nature.  Any way you choose to learn, get out and have fun today!

It is starting to feel like the holidays have arrived, a time for snow and lights, cross-country skiing in the woods followed by hot cocoa inside, a quiet evening with family and presents, presents, presents!  My wife and I are both avid readers, so the hunt is on for each of us to find that book that will be relished but that has not yet even been contemplated.  I love to browse through bookstores, especially those with both new and used volumes just waiting for me to find them.  Here are some of my favorites.

City Creatures: Animal Encounters in the Chicago Wilderness, edited by Gavin Van Horn and Dave Aftandilian is full of essays and poems, accompanied by illustrations and photographs, that introduce you to a variety of species that live among us in the urban environments of northeastern Illinois.  The book is divided into six sections; each introduces us to a different place that includes animal encounters.  Gavin Van Horn is also the creative director and executive editor for the Center for Humans and Nature, and you can find several of his pieces framing new perceptions of the environment on their website.

Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival, and its companion volume, Summer World: A Season of Bounty, both by Bernd Heinrich are in-depth explorations of what it takes for different species to survive the environmental conditions present at different times of the year.  Heinrich looks at many of the adaptations that allow animals to find appropriate shelter, warmth, food and mates in extreme conditions.

Fire and Ice by Jonathan Mingle is an investigative piece written over several years of traveling to the Himalayan region of Zanskar in northwest India.  In recent years, this region has been drastically changed by drought due to disappearing glaciers.  Mingle ties this in with the problems being generated by black carbon, the unburned particulate matter from fire of all types.  He tells a wonderful tale of the people and their family stories, as well as how black carbon is making a huge impact on their region and the entire world.

Another section of my shelves includes books that provide a wonderful assortment of activities that can involve everything  from individual investigations to gathering data for citizen science projects. 

The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling by John Muir Laws is a detailed presentation on how to make simple to complex drawings for anyone who enjoys the hobby of journaling.  It includes instructions on making simple line drawings, the use of colored pencils, and working with watercolors.  There are numerous examples on what to journal, gathering your thoughts in the written word and transferring your observations to pictures on a page.  A fun and entertaining treatment of nature journaling.

The Amateur Naturalist by Gerald Durrell, published in 1983, or by Nick Baker, published in 2005, are both excellent books with tips and activities on observing nature.  They provide information about different habitats and species, how to make observations of each, what data to record, activities that will make your time fun and rewarding, and suggestions on how your data may be used by yourself and others.  The books identify tools to collect and use to make your ventures into nature fun learning experiences.

A companion volume, How To Shoot An Amateur Naturalist by Gerald Durrell, tells us how he made the television series “The Amateur Naturalist,” based on the book above.  It is a humorous and fun story of film making, adventure and travel concentrating on learning natural history using a variety of the techniques and activities detailed in his book.

Another fun book is The Big Year by Mark Obmascik, also made into a motion picture starring Jack Black, Steve Martin and Owen Wilson.  The book takes us on a wild romp through nature areas, backyards and wild places with the goal of counting as many bird species as possible in one calendar year.  Documenting the journeys of three bird watchers taking a year out of their lives to compete for the honor of counting the most birds in one year in the U.S., this volume is a humorous and insightful story of just how passion can turn a hobby into an obsession.

The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs by Tristan Gooley provides thoughtful insight on how to enhance your nature walks.  Everywhere we go, there are hundreds of things to see in nature.  This volume can help you learn what to look for that you may have missed in past walks.   The book provides dozens of ideas about what to look at, how to discern more detail, and what questions to consider as you discover things along your way.  A fun way to learn about learning as you enjoy each nature walk you take.

These books can provide a perfect starting place for a new year of activity and learning while having fun.  Find one for yourself or consider a gift book for a friend who loves nature.  If you have books that you have found to be insightful and interesting, or have started you on a new journey, consider posting them in the comments section for this blog.  Have fun browsing!