Spring has officially arrived! Things are warming up outside; flowers are blooming, leaves are coming back to the trees, and the urge to get outside and spend some quality nature time is real.
As a reader, Spring’s arrival often translates to getting curious about and connecting to nature through books. Whether it’s a writer’s descriptive experience of a solitary mountain trail adventure, a meditation on the song of wild birds, or a how-to guide for observing and recording the animals in your backyard, nature writing brings the world to the page and can help shed new light on our own observations and experiences.
Here are a few books that can teach us more about the world outside, celebrate the rhythms and songs of nature, and lead us to discover the wonder all around us. Check out these books and more using the library’s Cloud Library app on your device!
Braiding Sweetgrass – Robin Wall Kimmerer
Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings―asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass―offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices.
Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard – Douglas Tallamy
If you’re concerned about doing something good for the environment, Nature’s Best Hope is the blueprint you need. Full of practical information, this book shows how homeowners everywhere can turn their yards into conservation corridors that provide wildlife habitats, protecting nature and our planet for generations to come.
Writing Wild: Women Poets, Ramblers, and Mavericks Who Shape How We See the Natural World – Kathryn Aalto
This charming collection celebrates and highlights the work of 25 women – scholars, spiritual seekers, conservationists, scientists, novelists, and explorers – whose nature writing will encourage you to pick up your pen, get outside, and get writing.
In Search of Mycotopia: Citizen Science, Fungo Fanatics, and the Untapped Potential of Mushrooms – Doug Bierend
In Search of Mycotopia introduces us to an incredible, essential, and oft-overlooked kingdom of life—fungi—and all the potential it holds for our future, through the work and research being done by an unforgettable community of mushroom-mad citizen scientists and microbe devotees.
Earth’s Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World – Kathleen Dean Moore
Who will forgive us if we don’t save nature’s songs? In this collection of essays on the music of the natural world, Moore celebrates the call of loons, howl of wolves, bellow of whales, and shriek of frogs, even as she warns of the threats against them.
