This category contains works describable under the very broad description of natural history, understood here as “a domain of inquiry involving organisms, including animals, fungi, and plants, in their natural environment, leaning more towards observational than experimental methods of study.”
Back in May of 2025, whilst attending The Biggest Week in American Birding, Dr. Robert Kirk, Princeton University Press’ Publisher of the Press’ Princeton Field Guides and Natural History categories, drew my attention to the then recently published Habitats of North America: A Field Guide for Birders, Naturalists, and Ecologists. Right away I could tell […]
This coming October, The Library of America will publish a new boxed set of their Rachel Carson Collection. I doubt that most regular readers of “The Well-read Naturalist” need any introduction to Rachel Carson or her work, but but for those who might be just beginning their journey into the wonders of natural history, she was a marine biologist whose trilogy of books about the sea have introduced the wonders of the ocean world and the challenges facing it to readers all around the world.
Substantially updated and expanded from the original 2013 edition, the new second edition of “The California Naturalist Handbook” provides very user-friendly introductions to and overviews of the plant and animal communities in the various ecoregions of the state.
In her recently published book “Beastly Britain; An Animal History,” Prof. Karen R. Jones delights her readers with recountings of the natural as well as social, folkloric, literary, and even linguistic histories of ten iconic British animal species.