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Scott Weidensaul

Scott is one of the few authors we are comfortable recommending any book sight unseen due to his skill as a writer and talents as a naturalist, not to mention being a good speaker on top of all of that! We've seen the book, and we are even more impressed with Scott's talent. In this book, Weidensaul retraces a journey taken some 50 years ago by Roger Tory Peterson and his companion, James Fisher, a noted British naturalist. Their journey began in Newfoundland, and followed the coast into Mexico, through the Southwest then the Pacific Northwest and into Alaska. While many of us might assume that the natural areas and feeling encountered then are long gone, the news isn’t all bad.

From the publisher: “On the eve of that book's fiftieth anniversary, naturalist Scott Weidensaul retraces Peterson and Fisher's steps to tell the story of wild America today. How has the continent's natural landscape changed over the past fifty years? How have the wildlife, the rivers, and the rugged, untouched terrain fared? The journey takes Weidensaul to the coastal communities of Newfoundland, where he examines the devastating impact of the Atlantic cod fishery's collapse on the ecosystem; to Florida, where he charts the virtual extinction of the great wading bird colonies that Peterson and Fisher once documented; to the Mexican tropics of Xilitla, which have become a growing center of ecotourism since Fisher and Peterson's exposition. And perhaps most surprising of all, Weidensaul finds that much of what Peterson and Fisher discovered remains untouched by the industrial developments of the last fifty years.”

Now in paperback! 394 pages + 8 plates, 5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches, b&w photos, October 2005, paperback Oct. 2006.