“My birth certificate was stamped with the State of Maine seal.” That’s number one in a list of bonuses Tom Hennessey can count from a lifetime spent haunting the state’s woods and waters and the creatures that inhabit them.

He might have paraphrased the Doxology: “Praise Maine from whom all blessings flow.”

The evocative pictures and prose in “Leave Some for Seed” are a paean to Maine, the “sportsmen’s paradise,” and a heartfelt plea to keep it that way.

From an early age, Hennessey was drawn to the outdoors with single-minded zeal. At school, young Tom was happy to forgo a sandwich to spend his lunch money on shotgun shells instead; then, after classes were done, race to a favorite covert to discharge them and bring home a rabbit or partridge.

He loved football and baseball, but going hunting or fishing “made more sense to me than going to practice.” The sport was only a part of it. As much as hunting, he “enjoyed observing nature, wildlife, and all of the fascinating interactions.”

Hennessey’s knowledge of game and woodsmanship has been handed down from generation to generation in the field and around the campfire. During deer season, when he was growing up, parents would arrange a few days out of school so the kids could join their fathers and grandfathers at family hunting camps, or “Maine’s Cultural Colleges,” as the essay about this particular tradition is called. Hunting 101 was “responsibility, discipline, and respect for elders.”

The essays collected here employ different rhetorical styles. There are straight-forward accounts of the author’s exploits, frequently coupled with memories of his mentors and companions, such as the return to a favorite hunting ground, now off-limits, “figuring that the Brewer cops would be at the traditional Armistice Day football game between Bangor and Brewer high schools.”

Chatty pieces aimed at “you” the reader take the tone of an op-ed columnist. Hennessey’s alter ego, Hank Lyons, is likely to hold Socratic discussions on issues such as migration and loss of habitat. One essay, “High-Spirited Sports,” brought to mind P.G. Wodehouse’s “Angler’s Rest,” where the characters are identified by their quaff, in the present case Jack Daniel’s, Hiram Walker and George Dickel.

The epic “Gunning Grounds” is laid out like a regular piece of prose, but it is not long before a rhyme and rhythm takes hold that would make Rudyard Kipling proud. The tale of a chilly sea-duck hunting expedition, it ends, “For warmed, you are, by the salty sound of lobster boats making their rounds, and in knowing, my friend, that you’ll return again to go out to the gunning grounds.”

Hennessey relishes the challenge of finding circuitous ways of saying simple things, as in the “aforementioned” (a much-used word) birth certificate. This game reaches its zenith referring to senior status. Thus you might be “eligible for complimentary Maine hunting licenses,” or “remember wearing red-and-black-checked jackets and caps,” or “recall daily limits of five woodcock and three black duck.”

Sporting terms provide another means of doing something similar. “Let’s draw a bead on the always-interesting subject,” and “Lengthening my cogitative casts, I wasn’t long in hooking onto the legal profession,” and “Don’t bait fate.”

But Hennessey is also adept with a simple, expressive phrase.

A fisherman’s reverie is “cut short when the bow spanked hard on a whitecap.” Duck hunters get up to “the sound of wind spitting snow against the windows in the wee hours.”

A replete sportsman turns in, listening “to the fire laughing at the jokes of the wind.”

The whole essay “Keeping Pace with Springtime,” in which an old man goes smelting where he has dipped his net all his life, is a gem.

Several essays tackle controversial issues that surround conservation as well as hunting. Early on, Hennessey draws a bead (rather more literally than the aforementioned example) on the upcoming referendum on bear-hunting (for unexplained reasons he doesn’t hunt bear – or moose – himself).

He’s against the ban on catching Atlantic salmon on the Penobscot: without the state’s stocking program, he says, the fish would be gone, although “I sincerely hope my mindset … is proven wrong.” As for climate change, “Most sportsmen are convinced it’s real.”

They are also rightly concerned about the “cultural changes” that chip away relentlessly at traditional public access. The issue is never far below the book’s surface, with its underlying mood of retrospection and nostalgia.

Hennessey wants to remind his peers of “the special times they’ve had afield and afloat and inspire them to leave some for seed – not only in terms of fish and game, but by introducing youngsters to the storied sporting traditions” of Maine.

Thomas Urquhart is a former director of Maine Audubon and the author of “For the Beauty of the Earth.”