Nature Books

These books would make excellent gifts for Scouts or Scouters. As a Scouter and outdoorsman they have been a source of inspiration, practical skills, Scouting history, outdoor lore, and for many years. If you follow the links and purchase an item on this page I get a referral fee. A Sand County Almanac I cannot gather wood and light a fire without recalling Leopold’s essay “Good Oak”: We mourned the loss of the old tree, but knew that a dozen of its progeny standing straight and stalwart on the sands had already taken over its job of wood-making....

Watch British wilderness bushcraft expert Ray Mears explore the Canadian wilderness in this fantastic six part series. We are off to Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario to go canoeing this summer, and we’ll be right on the Southern edge of the boreal forest I especially appreciated his visit with David Henry author of Canada’s Boreal Forest in the first episode. The Forgotten Forest The journey begins in Canada’s vast Boreal Forest, where the knowledge of the people who have called it home is essential to survival....

There you are, beyond cell phone range, without having seen a weather forecast in a day or two, looking at the sky and trying to read what the next day will bring. Will it rain? Is it going to get windy? Knowing how to read the weather is an important skill for Scouters and Eric Sloane’s Weather Book is a fine resource for developing your expertise. I refer to my copy (a small, well-worn, paperback found digging around in a used bookstore a couple of decades ago) regularly....

One of my goals for summer camp was sharpening my skills at identifying and understanding rocks and minerals. I started by reading ‘Rocks and Minerals’, one of a series of handbooks published by the Smithsonian Institution. Author Chris Pellant explains the basics and offers a guide for identifying rocks and minerals with excellent photographs and explanations that, after a bit of practice, I learned to use to identify the samples I found....

I’m pretty confident with identifying trees and wildflowers, even with a lot of the understory plants we encounter but I draw a blank when it comes to ferns (the best I can do is ‘that’s a fern!’). To increase my fern identifying skills I purchased the Fern Finder before we left for summer camp this year. The Fern Finder is one of a series of books published by Nature Study Guild Publishers that uses a ‘dichotomous key’ leading the reader through a number of steps to identifying a specific plant....

Read about the book Natural Navigation at The Next Challenge blog by Tim Moss. Tim took a course with Tristan Gooley the author of Natural Navigation: On an east-west running path in the northern hemisphere, you’ll find more puddles and dips on the southern side as it invariably gets less sunlight. You can sometimes get a gauge of north and south by putting a hand on different sides of a rock to see which has been warmed more by the sun....

Ellsworth Jaeger was an educator, author and curator of the Buffalo Museum of Science in Buffalo, New York. Born in 1897` Jaeger’s early inspiration was author and Scouting founder Ernest Thompson Seton. Jaeger later became one of Seton’s associates and business partners. He was an early television commentator and published seven books about nature and the outdoors, two of which are still in print. My favorite Jaeger book is Wildwoods Wisdom....

‘ I am on my mountain in a tree home that people have passed without ever knowing that I am here. The house is a hemlock tree six feet in diameter, and must be as old as the mountain itself. I came upon it last summer and dug and burned it out until I made a snug cave in the tree that I now call home. ‘ Like most boys there where times when I wanted to escape; to be self sufficient, independent, heroic....

If, when in the forest, we know the names of the trees we are more at home. My well-worn Golden Guide to Trees is a reliable source of information for tree identification. I have a couple of other guides but reach for the Golden Guide first because I find it easier to identify things from illustrations rather than photographs. The guide features over 730 species of trees grouped in 76 families....

We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes – something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view....

Most natural phenomena are reasonably easy to grasp once explained in plain terms. But alas much is hidden from the average person behind a wall of opaque scientific jargon. Anyone with the skill to penetrate this screen with clarity and simplicity is a wonderful discovery. Eric Sloane was such an author. His books are generously illustrated with his own drawings so the reader can see exactly what the author is writing about....

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Thoreau Walden is a record of Thoreau’s experiment with transcending ‘normal’ living in an attempt to understand the intrinsic nature of our existence. A weekend in the woods is Walden in miniature, a philosophical retreat....

‘ He worked slowly and carefully, keenly aware of his danger. Gradually, as the flame grew stronger, he increased the size of the twigs with which he fed it. He squatted in the snow, pulling the twigs out from their entanglement in the brush and feeding directly to the flame. He knew there must be no failure. When it is seventy-five below zero, a man must not fail in his first attempt to build a fire…’...