Armchair naturalist

Once again, Punxsutawney Phil, the Pennsylvania groundhog, has confirmed the undeniable fact of winter and quite sensibly returned to his burrow.  

I am restless in winter’s grasp. The season’s very stillness presents a challenge for me as a nature writer.  Much as I might hope to force spring to blossom like bulbs in a bowl, February remains a time of dormancy. It is a time of small changes, and ones that are felt rather than seen.  

Aside from various weather events and the flurry of wings by the feeder, I confess there is not much about the slowly beating heart of winter that lends itself easily to fresh description.

Instead, I search for inspiration from seed catalogs, planting marvelous gardens in my mind’s eye, or I settle in with a favorite book and follow wherever it leads.  

I turn especially at this time of year to those writers whose ability to write about the natural world  is truly transcendent, and whose gifts of narrative description I can only hope to emulate.

Holling Clancy Holling’s “Paddle to the Sea†remains one of my favorite books from childhood and one that yields new treasures when it is reread.  

A talented illustrator whose drawings convey as much information as his prose, Holling’s stories are both intimate in perspective and epic in scale.  He authored several books that share with “Paddle to the Sea†common plot devices — an ivory gull, a tree on a trail  — and a central journey. “Paddle†begins with a Native American boy who carves a figure of a man and a small canoe and sends them on an incredible journey, borne on hillside melt water,  on through the Great Lakes and all the way to the Gulf of St. Lawrence and beyond.

Yet along the way, as we learn about the natural history of this incredible waterway and the diversity of its human communities, others are inspired by the little canoe and its inscription: “Please put me back in the water.† 

Time flows like the river, and carries our hearts with it.

Morgan Bulkeley Sr. is one of our greatest local treasures.  During the 1960s and 1970s, his “My Berkshires†column in the Berkshire Eagle animated the land, people, history and ecology of this special place with a naturalist’s keen eye and the sensitivity of a writer (one who, not incidentally, studied with poet Robert Frost).

In 2004, the cream of more than 750 of these articles was lovingly edited by another local writer, Jon Swan of New Marlborough, Mass., and illustrated by the author’s son, artist Morgan Bulkeley Jr.

Published as “Berkshire Stories,†it abounds in exquisite storytelling and fascinating details about our region. This is masterful writing.

For many years, readers of the Boston Globe were blessed with science columns written by Chet Raymo.  A teacher of physics who prefers to think of himself as a naturalist, Raymo likes to say he  has a foot in both science and art.  He weaves the aesthetic and even the moral into his descriptions of how we apprehend the universe — whether in a grain of sand or the swirl of countless stars.  Raymo’s books are wondrous journeys with many intersections but never a false trail.  

It is easy to be mesmerized by the way these writers spin their stories, which drift beyond the confines of our homes and the frozen land outside.

These writers share a common fascination with the natural world and our place within it. They each have specialized knowledge, yet what sets them apart is their ability to integrate the perspectives of many disciplines in a narrative that engages and inspires.

Tim Abbott is program director of Housatonic Valley Association’s Litchfield Hills Greenprint. His blog is at greensleeves.typepad.com.

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