Wild Moments

A seasoned environmental reporter lets his meditative and poetic side shine in this collection of writings from Audubon magazine's ""Earth Almanac"" column. These essays, Williams says, functioned as ""retreats into what is pure and clean and right with the world""--an antidote to years of writing about air pollution, poisoned fish and electrocuted eagles (though he still writes about these and other issues in numerous outlets, including his ""Incite"" column in Audubon). Williams offers dozens of brief looks at nature's beauty, organized by season. His Winter section includes paragraphs on spotting wingless snow fleas (actually a species of springtail that looks much like it did 300 million years ago) and feeding bluebirds to give them a head start over other nesting birds, while Summer chronicles the ""Attack of the June Bugs"" (they are attracted to light), the ""Flying Lanterns"" that are fireflies and ""Salmon Recycling."" The short entries (there are generally two or three per page) make for easy browsing and, as Verlyn Klinkenborg writes in his foreword, the book is ""pure perception, a work in which the observer's presence has been distilled into nothingness, leaving only the world--the moment--that he has seen.""