In the last decade, the field guide has become the most common type of book about nature. Field guides are not new, of course. In one form or other, they have been around for at least a century. Roger Tory Peterson’s A Field Guide to the Birds, originally published in 1934, played a major role in creating the sport of birding, and its success inspired not only other bird guides but a whole series of Peterson Guides that covered practically every visible aspect of nature, from stars and planets to seashells.
But the typical nature book of the late 60s and the 70s was either a how-to account of outdoor activities like backpacking or an introduction to ecology, an inspirational look at the way nature works. The leader in the former category was The Compleat Walker by Colin Fletcher. The first edition became a best-seller and something of a publishing phenomenon in 1968. A thorough revision followed in 1974. Fletcher is an engaging writer who can make backpacking in summer in Arizona sound appealing, and his books helped set off a backpacking boom that soon overcrowded trail systems from Georgia to the Brooks Range.
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That was an ultimately unsatisfying way to relate to nature, and its shallowness was beautifully revealed in books like Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, a wonderful work that popularized the science of ecology.
We began to get a feel for the region. The flat, movielike image, the meaningless jumble of shapes, textures, and colors, became coherent; the rare species we used to miss suddenly jumped out at us. Our new view allowed every plant and animal its individuality while combining each separate organism into a whole whose beauty was levels beyond what any movie image could show.
If you are looking for deer, hunt for scrapes–patches of bare ground scraped clean by a buck’s hoof and then urinated on as a message to rival males and possibly interested females.
