The Writing Life Book Review: Field Guide to Wildlife Habitats of the Eastern United States

“Imagine diving headfirst into the water from a height of 50 feet and, at the precise moment, intersecting a fish that is desperately trying to evade you. Imagine repeating this every 20 minutes from 4 A.M. to 11 P.M. Parent kingfishers are on this schedule for weeks at a time . . .”

Janine Benyus’s field guide, organized by habitat, is interwoven with essay style descriptions that make identification of the plants, animals, geology and ecosystems easier to use than standard field guides.

I’ve spent a lot of time reading field guides this year. Some, like this book, are meant to be studied at home or in the classroom before heading out to explore a specific habitat. Knowing not only what a plant, fungus or animal looks like, but how it behaves increases your ability to correctly identify what you observe.

While field guides that feature comparisons of look-alikes provide important information, often plants, fungi and wildlife that look alike do not live in the same habitat.

Benyus provides easy-to-follow information on 38 distinct habitats without overloading the senses. You are much more likely to remember the information in her subheading “What’s in it for Wildlife,” with writing that shows, rather than tells what the wildlife is doing.

The book begins by showing readers how to use the guide and defining habitat. Benyus also offers tips on observing and getting closer to wildlife. Each chapter provides geological and ecological histories in Benyus’s essay style and a closer look at the lives of a representative mammal, bird and reptile or amphibian inhabitant.

Sidebar information includes a map and sampling list of locations where the habitat exists, a list of characteristic plants, a two-page illustration of the habitat and an interactive Wildlife Locator Chart that lets readers pinpoint the nesting and feeding sites of over 40 residents of each habitat.

This guide and its companion The Field Guide to Wildlife Habitats of the Western United States, belong on every teacher’s desk, in every public and home library, not just for the information, but for the pleasure of reading an engaging nature writer.

JJ Murphy is a freelance nature writer, photographer, forager, and aspiring mycologist giving nature a voice at http://www.blogger.com/”http://www.WriterByNature.com”.

The Writing Life: Musing with Authors

I just finished reading The Outermost House by Henry Beston. I would never have heard of this book, which was popular from 1928 through 1988, if nature writer Jim Capossela had not told me about it.

Capossela, the Rachel Ray of the streams and woods, is witty and clever. So far, I’ve read Camp and Trail Cooking Techniques and dipped into Good Fishing Close to New York City.

With the advent of the Internet, e-books and the Kindle reader, it appears that we tend to ignore valuable existing books in our pursuit of the next new thing. There’s something special about nature and field guides, but there’s not a wide audience for these books. The information in the classic field guides remains accurate, which makes naturalist writers something of an oddity. Even the most chatty field guides do not read like a good novel. Writing a field guide takes the mind of a scientist and the soul of an artist.

When it comes to hanging out with respected nature writers, I’m twice blessed. Gary Lincoff, author of the Amazon Field Guide to Mushrooms, is that rare combination of scientific mind and compelling storyteller. I’d rather hang out with Gary than any rock star I can name. You don’t even realize you’re learning when you attend a lecture or workshop. When Gary arrived dressed as Charles Darwin, I was so captivated by his presentation, I didn’t realize I had taken notes, until I looked in my notebook several days later.

Writing in a narrow field for a niche market can be isolating at times. There’s nothing better to motivate me than to hang out with respected, published naturalists. This may not be the most financially lucrative field in writing, but getting to know the rock stars of the field guide world is worth much more to me.

JJ Murphy is a freelance nature writer, photographer, blogging hiker, forager, locavore, and tree-hugger with more than 50 years of eco-centric living experience. Visit http://www.writerbynature.com/ if you need relevant content that captures your personal style and tone.

The Writing Life: Say What?

By JJ Murphy

When I was a graduate student at the William Allen White School of Journalism in Lawrence, Kansas, information considered news was checked and checked again before it was published. Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite represented broadcast journalism’s gold standard.

One of my fundamental lessons was to read copy out loud, uncover and eliminate weak writing before going on the air. I read articles intended for newspaper and magazine publication out loud for the same reason.

Twenty-first-century TV and online journalism has too much entertainment for me to take the content seriously. Many newspapers have stopped print distribution, but I know that bad writing will continue to make it into print, since so many publications appear to have no editors and no proofreaders.

Consider the following:

Miners Refuse to Work After Death – (I wasn’t planning to, either.)

Panda Mating Fails; Veterinarian Takes Over – (Is that legal?)

Police Begin Campaign to Run Down Jaywalkers – (With horses, motorcycles, or cruisers?) Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant – (Before or after everything else fails?)

Red Tape Holds Up New Bridges – (Is that like duct tape?)

Man Struck By Lightning Faces Battery Charge – (You mean he IS the battery charge?)

Kids Make Nutritious Snacks – (Do they taste like pizza?)

Local High School Dropouts Cut in Half – (With chainsaws? Yikes!)

Typhoon Rips Through Cemetery; Hundreds Dead – (Weren’t they already dead?)

Idioms, colloquialisms, and the sheer malleability of the English language make it more difficult to write clearly and concisely. Bad journalistic content only becomes dangerous when the viewers stop laughing and start taking those misleading words seriously.

JJ Murphy is a freelance nature writer, photographer, blogging hiker, forager, locavore, and tree-hugger with more than 50 years of eco-centric living experience. Visit http://www.writerbynature.com/ if you need relevant content that captures your personal style and tone.

The Writing Life: Thinking Outside the Box

The universe is still laughing at my plan to spend the lengthening days of June outdoors under the stars. It has rained for all but two days in June.

Since I typically do my best writing after a hike in the woods, the weather has cramped my style on several levels. Even if I were lucky, I’m not immune to writer’s block, which is why I keep several books, like Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones on my bookshelf.

One of my favorite exercises is the one Goldberg calls “The Action of a Sentence.” Here are the rules:

1. Fold a sheet of paper in half the long way
2. On the left side of the page, list any ten nouns
3. Turn the paper over to the right column
4. Think of any occupation (teacher, plumber, mechanic, scientist)
5. List fifteen verbs that relate to that occupation
6. Open the page - you will see nouns listed on the left and verbs listed on the right

Now, create sentences using one noun and one verb (you can change the tense) from each column. Here is what I came up with:

Nouns
pillow
shoe
lamp
brochure
battery
pump
rug
leaf
blanket
basket

Occupation-Carpenter
hammer
drill
saw
cut
construct
stain
install
assemble
build
chisel
plane
pour
finish
mold
erect

Sentences:

Pillows planed the bed sheets until they were flat.
Brochures drilled holes into the desk.
An old shoe chiseled a place for itself on the rack.
A maple leaf hammered at the window.

The idea is not to “make sense” in conventional terms, but to open up creative channels and stimulate new ideas. Try it!
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JJ Murphy is a freelance nature writer, photographer, blogging hiker, forager, locavore, and tree-hugger with more than 50 years of eco-centric living experience. Visit www.WriterByNature.com if you need relevant content that captures your personal style and tone.

The Writing Life: Longevity of Books

The Writing Life Book Review:

I’m holding a 1906 copy of How to Know the Wild Flowers, originally published in 1893 by Mrs. William Starr Dana. More about the author later.

What’s incredible, besides the fact that it is the first wildflower field guide published in the USA, is that the field information is as relevant to day as it was 116 yeas ago. I can’t name a current nonfiction book with that kind of longevity.

The subtitle: A Guide to the Names, Haunts and Habits of Our Common Wild Flowers is an accurate description of what you’ll find in the book. But I think the subtitle should be: When Field Guides Were Fun. Each section covers the plants with flowers of the same color, which makes it “field friendly.”

After a factual description of root, stem, leaf, flower, and seeds or fruit, the author launches into a bit of poetry, a folk remedy or some other phrase that brings me right into the woods with her. The line drawings of the majority of wild flowers are so detailed that I forget they’re not in color.

The 50 color plates almost leap off the page.

For comparison’s sake, I went to the library and checked out the 1963 version of How to Know the Wild Flowers. Just holding them, I notice that the 1906 book is bulkier and the paper and binding sturdier. There are no color plates in the 1963 edition. It makes me wonder what a book published in 1893 looks and feels like.

My brief count-up of the indexed plants shows that the 1906 book has about 750 plants listed, but the 1963 version lists over 1,000 plants. Since the author died in 1952, I wonder who added the 250 plants. A deeper look into the book reveals that plants were not simply added, some were deleted or their names were changed. Botanical names change frequently as knowledge is discovered. In the last 5-10 years, the application of DNA evidence has revealed that some plants formerly thought to be members of different families share DNA. Although I may be reading different names for the same plant, that still doesn’t change the physical appearance, habitat, or growth pattern of the plant in the field.

This author of many field guides was not allowed to publish under her own name in 1893, hence the author credit “Mrs. William Starr Dana.” She was widowed and then remarried and her name became Frances Theodora Parsons. A respected and accomplished botanist, her acquaintances included Theodore Roosevelt and Rudyard Kipling. In the 21st Century it’s easy to take our economic and social power for granted and forget what our grandmothers and great-grandmothers have fought for and gained since the 19th Century.

It’s also easy to forget the pleasures of holding a book in this age of Kindle, e-books, and scribd.com. Call me a Luddite, but a field guide is meant to be taken into the field, where I often cannot receive a WI-FI signal anyway.

JJ Murphy is a freelance nature writer, photographer, blogging hiker, forager, locavore, and tree-hugger with more than 50 years of eco-centric living experience. Visit www.WriterByNature.com if you need relevant content that captures your personal style and tone.

The Writing Life: Recycling Books -- Thinking Outside the Box

by JJ Murphy

I’m holding a copy of a book first published in 1893. More about that in the next WITS issue. This field guide was well cared for, but I can still read it and admire the expensive color plates and high quality paper.

But this used book is an exception. What can we do with books that are worn or damaged beyond repair, now considered outdated or otherwise taking up space? Here are three ideas:

Recycled Reads is more than the Austin, Texas library bookstore. Created as part of that city’s “go green” initiative, they accept used books. Books that are likely to sell – for two dollars or less – are attractively shelved in a cozy bookstore. The much-needed proceeds benefit the library.

Recycled Reads goes one step further. Rather than dump books unlikely to sell into the landfill, they pass unsold to Books Beyond Borders, which helps Project Schoolhouse, provide textbooks and build schools in third-world countries. Books Beyond Borders also sends these books to organizations that create building supplies.

Beyond selling books, Recycled Reads is sponsoring a series of workshops on how to create art from books. I’m from the generation that was taught it was sacrilege to deface a book. But creating a work of art sure beats dumping books in the trash. I just read about a Washington DC artist who turns book covers into hand bags - or maybe she’s redefining the term “book bag.” I’m looking forward to learning what else artists create from books that are no longer fit to read.

I’m slow to adopt new technology. Kindle seems expensive and I do like the feel of a book. But I can see the value of creating reading opportunities without impacting the earth. Meanwhile, I’m delighted to learn that I don’t have to add every worthy book to my library to rescue it from the landfill.

JJ Murphy is a freelance nature writer, photographer, blogging hiker, forager, locavore, and tree-hugger with more than 50 years of eco-centric living experience. Visit www.WriterByNature.com if you need relevant content that captures your personal style and tone.

The Writing Life Word Game: What Do the Following Words Have in Common?

A fellow writer sent this list to see who could figure out the puzzle. The bolded first letter is a clue to the figuring out the puzzle.

Banana
Dresser
Grammar
Potato
Revive
Uneven
Assess

I confess, I stared at this list for several minutes, gave up, and came back to look at it later.

Once you get the answer, I expect your response will be, “Oh, how obvious.” But until then it’s a bit of a brainteaser.

I’ve been contemplating the amazing flexibility and resulting confusion of the English language as a response to cabin fever this past winter. It has been impossible to cross country ski or snowshoe on ice, so I’ve spent a good deal more time indoors than I normally would.

I enjoy word games and puzzles, especially when I learn new words or new ways to use words.
So, have fun, take your time and see if this little puzzle suddenly reveals itself.

I finally gave up and peeked at the answer, so you’re ahead of me if you can figure this out for yourself.

Give up? Here’s the answer:
Take the first letter in each word and place it at the end of the word and then spell the word backwards – you’ll have the same word.

The Writing Life: English is a Fickle Language

English is a Fickle Language When One Word Has Opposite Meanings!

I’m at a disadvantage in the 21st Century, because I still have a 20th Century vocabulary. I need help finding the right key words for my own Web site. And when I’m researching online it could take me days to find the word or words that yield the Web sites with the information I actually want.

So, this column is devoted to words that are spelled the same way, even have identical pronunciation, but can mean very different things.

One of my favorites is fast. I find three meanings for this word. If I travel by car I’m moving fast, as opposed to walking. If I tie my tent stakes so they will not move at all, they are held fast. When I choose refrain from eating for a set period of time, that is a fast.

More of my favorite ambiguous words:

• Clip –what you do to a coupon, or what you do with a paperclip
• Note –what’s written on paper, or the specific tone a musical instrument makes
• Sanction - which can mean either to permit or to penalize
• Seed – to plant them for food, or to remove them from food
• Seeded – added to the bread’s crust, or removed from fruit or vegetables
• Shade –tint or hue of a color, or refuge from the sun under a tree or large object
• Trunk – what grandma packed for a voyage, or a tree’s stem

Context is crucial to the meaning of these words. If you teach English as a second language, you have my deepest respect.

I’m not the only writer who has pondered this paradoxical ambiguity in words. My clumsy keyword search did lead me to this Web site: http://www--personal.umich.edu/~cellis/antagonym.html. The writer claims to have created the word ANTAGONYMS to describe this group of words. That works for me. The author is kind enough to create a longer list than my few examples, including slang circa 1999.

JJ Murphy is a freelance nature writer, photographer, blogging hiker, forager, locavore, and tree-hugger with more than 50 years of eco-centric living experience. Visit http://www.writerbynature.com/ if you need relevant content that captures your personal style and tone.