The Curious Naturalist

The Curious Naturalist: Nature’s Everyday Mysteries
Down East Book, 1991

The Curuious NaturalistOutside your window, in your backyard, or in your local beach or park, on city streets or even inside your house, plants and animals are doing something wholly unexpected and incredibly interesting. Houseflies are washing their eyes with their hands. Porcupines dance. Worms are making love in the wet, green grass while spiders are weaving messages into their webs. Sy’s first collection of Nature Journal columns from The Boston Globe, with a generous foreword by the late great Roger Tory Peterson, will make you appreciate the ordinary miracles unfolding around us every day.

From the Foreword by Roger Tory Peterson:

This delightful series of essays by Sy Montgomery reached me just as I was wearing out form the seemingly endless slavery at my desk and drawing board. In reading them, I could relate to almost every page, every informative chapters, because my home in Connecticut is on 75 acres of second growth woodland clothing a rocky ridge, with some open spaces, a bit of marshland on the far side and even a man-made pond.

[The Curious Naturalist] is divided into the four seasons, concentrating on some of the same plant and animal life that I have around my home and that I can observe every day as I walk the long leafy trail from the house to my studio—everything from lowly lichens and fungi to the elitist turkey cocks that act as thought hey own the place.

This book is a mine of information. It has made me far better informed about the diversity of life around my own home, things that I had taken for granted: everything from the weather—the mud, rain, ice and snow that wild things must endure; the mammals, such as squirrels, skunks and beavers, and their aerial associates, the birds; down to the ever-abundant flies, mosquitoes, and spiders upon which many of them must make their living.

Read Sy Montgomery and enjoy!