cover image Out of the Woods: A Bird Watcher's Year

Out of the Woods: A Bird Watcher's Year

Ora E. Anderson. Ohio University Press, $28.95 (176pp) ISBN 978-0-8214-1741-6

The life of journalist, conservationist and artist Anderson (1911-2006) spanned nearly the entire 20th century; as such, he witnessed the enormous changes-technological, medical and economic-that left few untouched wildlands in the state of Ohio and the nation at large. The woods he wanders in these short essays, written in the final years of his life, are those he planted with his wife on the 92-acre farm they purchased in 1956 (and which became, after his death, a conservatory). Reporting on season-by-season changes, Anderson notes the arrival of birds in spring and their departure in fall, the ducklings and goslings reared on his ponds and the disruptions caused by beavers and deer-seemingly minor events that make for undeniably pleasurable reading. Essays are interspersed with vivid poems, haiku-like in their verbal parsimony and eloquent in their evocation of time and place. Anderson was also a woodcarver, who recreated the birds he observed in ""basswood and water tupelo,"" and he riffs charmingly on a number of different species and varieties in prose that's generously peppered with rueful observations and bemused wonder. Filled with precise description and pithy metaphor, expressive description and elegant phrasing, this book is a joy to read and rewards subsequent revisits with stylistic wit and wild beauty.