The Founding Fish
10 best books like The Founding Fish (John McPhee): Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds, The Empty Ocean, The Lost Grizzlies: A Search for Survivors in the Colorado Wilderness, An Entirely Synthetic Fish: How Rainbow Trout Beguiled America and Overran the World, Journey of the Pink Dolphins: An Amazon Quest, Summer World: A Season of Bounty, The Birds of Heaven: Travels with Cranes, Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination, Crossing Open Ground, The Amateur Naturalist
| Author | Scott Weidensaul |
| ISBN | 0865475911 |
Bird migration is the world's only true unifying natural phenomenon, stitching the continents together in a way that even the great weather systems fail to do. Scott Weidensaul follows awesome kettles of hawks over the Mexican coastal plains, bar-tailed godwits that hitchhike on gale winds 7,000...
| Author | Richard Ellis |
| ISBN | 1559636378 |
In The Empty Ocean, acclaimed author and artist Richard Ellis tells the story of our continued plunder of life in the sea and weighs the chances for its recovery. Through fascinating portraits of a wide array of creatures, he introduces us to the many forms of sea life that humans have fished, hunted,...
| Author | Rick Bass |
| ISBN | 0395717590 |
Do grizzly bears still wander the San Juan Mountains of Colorado, where they have long been considered extinct? If so, can they elude the naturalists determined to prove that these bears, smarter than all other bears, survive in the mountain wilderness? Rick Bass, along with veteran grizzly expert...
| Author | Anders Halverson |
| ISBN | 0300140878 |
Anders Halverson provides an exhaustively researched and grippingly rendered account of the rainbow trout and why it has become the most commonly stocked and controversial freshwater fish in the United States. Discovered in the remote waters of northern California, rainbow trout have been artificially...
| Author | Sy Montgomery |
| ISBN | 0743200268 |
Scientists call them "Inia geoffrensis," an ancient species of toothed whale whose origin dates back about 15 million years. To the local people of the Amazon, pink river dolphins are "botos," shape shifters that, in the guise of human desire, can claim your soul and take you to the Encante, an enchanted...
| Author | Bernd Heinrich |
| ISBN | 0060742178 |
“Bernd Heinrich is one of our greatest living naturalists in the tradition of Gerald Durrell….A national treasure.”
—Los Angeles Times
Summer World is an intimate, accessible, and eloquent illumination of animal survival in the Summer months from Bernd Heinrich,...
| Author | Peter Matthiessen |
| ISBN | 0865476578 |
“You don’t have to be a ‘craniac’ . . . to appreciate [this book] . . . All you really need is a passion for prose as good as it gets.” —Chicago Tribune
In legend, cranes often figure as harbingers of heaven and omens of longevity and good fortune. And in nature, they are an “umbrella...
| Author | Barbara Hurd |
| ISBN | 0618215123 |
In these nine evocative essays, Barbara Hurd explores the seductive allure of bogs, swamps, and wetlands. Hurd's forays into the land of carnivorous plants, swamp gas, and bog men provide fertile ground for rich thoughts about mythology, literature, Eastern spirituality, and human longing. In...
| Author | Barry Lopez |
| ISBN | 0679721835 |
As an collection of journalistic pieces and essays, Crossing Open Ground is slightly less consistent in its overwhelming awe than Lopez' other works. His earlier, more explicitly journalistic pieces seem less impressive than the later works, which tend to be the ones that spend more time drawing...
| Author | Gerald Durrell |
| ISBN | 0394533909 |
I read the "Amateur Naturalist" over 30 years ago and dreamed of someday designing a natural history laboratory in the way of Gerald and Lee Durrell. Alas, the years slipped by, and my dream remained unfulfilled. And then, surprisingly, I recently embarked upon a new teaching career in math and science....
| Author | David Quammen |
| ISBN | 0743200322 |
In 1981 David Quammen began what might be every freelance writer's dream: a monthly column for Outside magazine in which he was given free rein to write about anything that interested him in the natural world. His column was called "Natural Acts," and for the next fifteen years he delighted Outside's...
| Author | Katy Payne |
| ISBN | 0140285962 |
A natural history rich in observation of the animal world and how humans participate in it, Silent Thunder is also a passionate story of scientist Katy Payne's spiritual quest as she turns a keen eye on her role in this world. Starting with the story of her revolutionary discovery that elephants use infrasonic...
| Author | Edward Abbey |
| ISBN | 0805006036 |
The book is divided into four parts: Politics, Travel, Books and Art and Nature Love (just one short bit on predator hunting calls and littering).
The Politics section is as expected: deep insights into Abbey's anarchic views, some founded in legitimate reason, others in a bit of selfish or...
| Author | Loren Eiseley |
| ISBN | 0803267355 |
Toward the end of his life, Loren Eiseley reflected on the mystery of life, throwing light on those dark places traversed by himself and centuries of humankind. Weaving together memoir, philosophical reflection, and his always keen observations of the natural world, Loren Eiseley’s essays in...
| Author | Thomas McGuane |
| ISBN | 0224061011 |
Thomas McGuane's obsession with fish has taken him from the river in his backyard to the holiest waters of the fly-fisher's world. As he travels the fish take him to many and various subjects ripe for random speculation: rods and reels, the classification of anglers according to the flies they prefer,...
My Rating – Must Read
Level – Quick, easy
Summary
Another collection of musings from John Gierach. Topics include bass fishing, private ponds, walking sticks, British Columbia, and of course the title chapter – ‘Sex, Death, & Fly-Fishing’. I’d say spoiler...
| Author | Dan Flores |
| ISBN | 0700622276 |
America's Great Plains once possessed one of the grandest wildlife spectacles of the world, equaled only by such places as the Serengeti, the Masai Mara, or the veld of South Africa. Pronghorn antelope, gray wolves, bison, coyotes, wild horses, and grizzly bears: less than two hundred years ago these...
| Author | Wendell Berry |
| ISBN | 1887178287 |
This short book of essays helped give me some focus on how to see the world and approach my living in it. I relay needed the “pick me up” it gave me after getting so worn down every day by the evidence of the inconvenient truth of the mess we’re in and worn down by the ineffective polarization sowed by...
