“Pieces of a folksy quilt, with widely varied swatches woven together to create a pleasing whole.” So, in the introduction to “Through a Naturalist’s Eyes,” Michael J. Caduto hazards the way an artist might think about New England. “But this is a living tapestry of complex bioregions and natural communities whose compositions of plants and animal …” Oh, no, I thought. The comparison seemed to point resolutely, if inadvertently, to the contrast between literary style and what I might call eco-speak, with the author heading toward the latter.

I could not have been further off the mark.

The book is a series of some 50 short essays that use Caduto’s personal experiences in the natural world to jump-start a little scientific education. Nature, as the reader is implicitly reminded, can be found everywhere, so long as one is open to it, and it doesn’t have to loom large with weighty epiphanies.

Caduto has been using his deep knowledge of ecology, together with his talents as a storyteller and musician, to promote environmental awareness for over 30 years. From giving CPR to a chipmunk in front of a troop of young campers to encountering two centuries of animal effluvia in the old house he lives in, his encounters with New England’s flora and fauna from the most obvious to the most obscure are a delight to read.

Starting off, the stories are packaged under a helpfully basic series of sections: Animals, Plants, Habitats. In one, he parses the various small rodents that the uninitiated might call “mice” when they find them. In another he informs us that, far from being passive, “Plants Fight Back,” and goes into the variety of ways they do it.

Winter has a section all to itself: Plants and animals use fascinating strategies to survive in frigid New England, including making their own antifreeze. Beavers and muskrats change their metabolism to allow for longer dives under the ice. How some mechanisms work is still mysterious. “Scientists have yet to discover exactly how the normally air-breathing turtle survives submerged all winter in oxygen-challenged conditions,” he tells us.

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Natural history gets even more complicated in the section called Interrelationships. Come winter, snakes snuggle down with frogs and salamanders, “animals which, in autumn, might have been the snake’s prey.” In summer, hummingbirds follow sapsuckers around, sipping the sap from the neat rows of holes they leave. Caduto calls these “nature’s soda fountain,” and they are used by numerous birds besides hummers.

Patterns and Perceptions addresses nature’s knack for creating designs like hexagons and spirals. It is fortunate we find them so aesthetically pleasing, he says, because all it is forming are “patterns that create the most efficient spatial relationships.”

There is a whole section for bio-foodies, Harvests and Hunts: If you are only into ramps and fiddleheads, you haven’t lived. That many of the items on his forager’s list come from Abenaki lore is not surprising. Caduto has written a number of books on Native American stories and customs.

Looking through a naturalist’s eyes is all the richer when those eyes are Caduto’s. Watching a spotted turtle drift by in a pond under black ice, he sees a “window into another world, that clear crystalline floor beneath my feet, was the turtle’s winter sky.” And speaking of ponds, I personally prefer his likening them to “liquid eyes gazing up to the sky and catching the sun’s life-giving energy,” over Thoreau’s dubious reference to “Earth’s eye” and measuring the depth of one’s own nature.

In the final section, Stewardship, one essay goes through the impacts of dams on the life of rivers and what happens when they are removed. As compelling as are the details, I find his vision quite enough: a river “swelling with the abundance of a cloudburst or trickling through sun-blanched cobbles during the height of summer drought.”

Not that there is only the poetry of nature in these pages. Caduto is quick to reinforce his own impressions with the knowledge of an expert, often from a fish and game department or a watershed council.

Perhaps my favorite is the physician’s assistant who gave the town of Plainfield, New Hampshire, its official “town mollusk” and created “Mussel Beach” on a stretch of the Connecticut River. The dwarf wedge mussel, Caduto admits, is hardly as spectacular as some endangered species, but it has an interesting life cycle and, to aquatic biologists, is an “underwater version of the canary in the coal mine.” And Plainfield “just happens to think its tiny Town Mollusk is kind of cute.”

Natural history will always be a rich opportunity for discovery. “Through a Naturalist’s Eyes” celebrates why it is also such fun.

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


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