Naturally Curious

A National Outdoor Book Award-winner, this pictorial guide invites readers to explore a year in New England's natural environment.

Naturalist and environmental educator Mary Holland's visually astounding book Naturally Curious offers boundless enthusiasm and a lifetime's-worth of natural history knowledge, escorting readers through the New England seasons, month by month—in sun, rain, and snow; along roadsides and riverbanks; above burrows and under treetop nesting sites.

Beginning with March and its early stirrings of life awakening after a long cold winter, and ending in February as survival becomes the sole focus of all plants and creatures, great and small, Holland provides hundreds of fascinating Nature Notes. These bite-size nuggets of fact-based information detail a species' actions in a particular month—whether courting, breeding, singing, burrowing, migrating, or caching food. In addition, you'll find pertinent lists of the amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, insects and arachnids, and plants and fungi you might expect to see or hear from as the weeks go by. But that's not all: Each month culminates in specially chosen essays, where Holland gets up-close-and-personal with New England plant and animal life and some of their more intriguing typicalities and peculiarities, illustrating their impact on the region and those who share it. Throughout, the many exciting and varied worlds of the Northeast explode upon the page in an unmatched visual display of full-color photographs.

By deftly melding the practical field guide we all need with the kind of book we all want to sit back and read, Holland does New England—and those who live in it, visit it, and love it—an immense service. Adults and children alike are sure to be fascinated by the natural world in this book, in their backyard, and even further afield.