siana’s wetlands are a religious thing for Christopher Hallowell. “Life begins for untold animal and plant species in the twilight of swamps and the hidden reaches of marshes,” he writes. “They are breeding grounds, cradles, larders, the source of life, fecund beyond comprehension.” In Holding Back the Sea, Hallowell sounds the alarm on behalf of these natural nurseries. Louisiana’s 300 miles of wetlands almost half the coastal wetlands in the U.S. are rapidly succumbing to man-made depredations. Artificial levees, reckless tunneling and drilling for oil are killing off native wildlife, from marsh grass to oyster to muskrat. Throw in the global warming that is raising the level of the adjacent Gulf of Mexico, and you’ve got an entire state slowly sinking below sea level.

It’s not just a plethora of critters that’s in peril, Hallowell explains. The loss of wilderness threatens Louisiana’s booming oil and natural gas industries whose pipes lie under a shallow layer of sand on an eroding beach. With Louisiana quietly providing 25% of the nation’s natural gas and nearly 20% of its oil, the prospect of losing this resource is horrifying. Saltwater intrusion on freshwater wetlands also endangers Louisiana’s oysters and the communities that have for generations made their living by oystering. Why is an environmentally conscious nation letting these things happen? Hallowell cites some tentative reasons. Louisiana’s reputation for dumping toxins in its own marshes is one possibility. The state’s relative invisibility is another. While Floridians raise a hue and cry over the Everglades, the death of Louisiana’s sweeping wetlands provokes few headlines, Hallowell argues. On his travels through the wetlands, Hallowell meets memorable characters, politicians, fishermen and engineers who give the narrative the feel of a novel at times. His skill in conveying the demise of the Louisiana oyster reveals the fragile interconnection of living things in a way few writers have accomplished since Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf. Though it’s necessarily scientific and technical, Hallowell’s ability to poeticize nature makes this an eminently readable book.

Lynn Hamilton writes from Tybee Island, Georgia.

avid Gessner’s third book, Return of the Osprey: A Season of Flight and Wonder, an account of his observations of four pairs of ospreys over a full nesting season, has an intensity born of understanding both nature and humanity. Gessner immerses himself in the lives of these magnificent birds, once driven almost to extinction by the pesticide DDT, as a way of exploring the interconnectedness of the world around him. He calls it an experiment in seeing in vision. Gessner is not a scientist, and for that we are grateful. We follow the birds as he does from his home on Cape Cod, with an unfolding sense of wonder and awe. We marvel at the return of these birds to numbers approximating their abundance in the 1930s; we take measure of a bird 24 inches high, with a wing span of six feet, who weighs only four pounds; we wiggle our thumbs in an attempt to understand the intricacies of a reversible outer talon capable of turning a fish in midair; we try to imagine the physical sensation of diving through the air, wings thrown back at the last minute to plunge into the water feet first; we laugh at the sight of half a naked Barbie doll, carefully selected as ideal nest-building material for a messy nest above a busy parking lot. Through the ospreys’ day-to-day living, Gessner connects us to timeless themes of life and death and human struggles with ourselves and others. He weaves glimpses of his family and neighbors and personal insights into the narrative of his search and vow to spend more time with the birds. Praised in his earlier books A Wild, Rank Place and Under the Devil’s Thumb for his rich lyricism, Gessner does not disappoint here. Painting scenes of what he sees and hears and smells and feels, he touches us not so much with subtleties of style, but with the eloquence and clarity of patient and persistent observation. Emerson, he says, was right, that to see is everything. And it is precisely the gift of his sight that Gessner has given his readers in this book. For anyone interested in our connections and disconnections to nature, this is a delightful romp from the marshes of wilderness to the pavements of civilization.

Temple West is a writer in Norfolk, Virginia.

The title of William Souder’s book is meant to shock and attract attention; A Plague of Frogs is not so much about a particular area stricken by a plague of frogs, as it is the frogs themselves being plagued. This curious phenomenon involves the discovery of several species of frogs afflicted at birth with the most grotesque deformities: multiple limbs, stunted or absent limbs, eyeballs growing inside frogs’ mouths the list of abnormalities is endless. Although recent studies have found that this plague has affected frogs throughout history in varying regions of the world, it was in central Minnesota that the frogs’ predicament recently attracted the attention of scientists. In 1995, a group of school children and their teacher found an alarming number of deformed frogs at a farmer’s pond during a field trip, and the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) was among the first of many groups and individuals to get involved. William Souder first reported on the case of deformed frogs in Minnesota for the Washington Post. He then became embroiled in the quest for knowledge alongside representatives of many governmental agencies. As in all good investigative journalism, Souder presents readers first and foremost with a story. The journey toward knowledge is, in fact, the story here. The cast of characters includes a group of middle school students from Le Sueur, Minnesota; the farmers and landowners on whose land the frogs were found; many branches of governmental agencies; university scientists; and Bruce Babbitt, secretary of the U.S. Department of Interior.

Although many hypotheses have been proposed for the causes of the frogs’ deformities including UV radiation, parasites, and pesticides nothing conclusive has been found, other than evidence that the maladies originate in the water inhabited by the frogs. This theory poses a threat for all animal species, including our own. With many frog species throughout the world becoming extinct, the ever-present question is, what is behind this plague? Souder’s timely book presents readers with a well-informed set of researchers who are working hard to find this very answer.

Krista Finstad Hanson is a writer and teacher in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Standing in front of the reptilium at the London zoo, author Jeremy Seal recalled one of his earliest fears: Years before, as a child, I had stood in this same doorway. I remember how I had imagined within a bottomless pit overflowing with snakes, plaits of snakes spilling on to the shiny floor to entangle themselves and slither numberless down long corridors, and the images had stopped me in my tracks. My palms had prickled with sweat and tears had welled up in my eyes, and thirty years later little had changed. His paranoia was such that he had become convinced that he would, sooner or later, die of snakebite.

To the average Joe, taking up residence in Ireland or some equally snake-free place would seem the prudent course, but then Jeremy Seal is not the average Joe. Having trekked all over Turkey a few years back in search of an elusive fez (A Fez of the Heart), Seal now takes us on a herpetological tour of such exotic locales as India, Kenya, Australia, and Alabama. Alabama, exotic? You bet, for in the northeast corner of the state, and in contiguous Tennessee and Georgia, are Pentecostal churches whose members routinely handle poisonous snakes in the name of faith. Seal chronicles the murder trial of a misguided minister who attempts to murder his wife by means of snakebite and then pass it off as suicide; in another vignette, he visits a country church to watch the handling of serpents firsthand. He chases the deadly taipan in Far North Australia, the hooded cobra in southern India, and in Kenya, the lethal black mamba. With equal doses of humor and, um, venom, Snakebite Survivors’ Club offers the reader as close a look at our slithery friends as he or she will likely ever want.

In an equally perilous part of the world specifically, the Brazilian rainforest nature writer and NPR commentator Sy Montgomery (Spell of the Tiger: The Man-Eaters of Sundarbans) pursues an altogether friendlier species, the pink freshwater dolphin (known locally as boto ) of the Amazon basin. Comparatively little is known about this rare species; the aquatic mammal is far better known in folklore than in fact. According to Amazonian legend, the dolphin can assume human shape and walk unrecognized on shore; it can even take a human lover. The danger in this is that the human half of the equation may be lured back to the dolphin’s homeland, Encantada (Portuguese for enchanted ), never to return to land.

Little research has been done on pink dolphins; their habitat is murky and piranha-infested, the creatures themselves are somewhat elusive and shy, and the rapid changes to the rainforest region have profoundly disturbed their normal patterns of life. Still, Montgomery is determined to view the dolphins, to add to the base of knowledge on their habits, and to forge a tentative cross-species bond with them: Within three minutes of our arrival, the dolphins appeared. I swam out to them, perhaps a quarter mile. All seven botos appeared, blowing, pulling their heads from the water to look One of the medium grays rolled on his back, waving his flippers, and then turned, flipping his tail. Moments later Montgomery discovered that the nearby fisherman’s net yielded two four-inch piranhas.

Seal’s easy humor and laid-back approach contrasts with Montgomery’s conservationist zeal and fascination with the occult, but each offers a rare look at far-off lands and the unusual creatures who call them home.

Bruce Tierney writes from Hendersonville, Tennessee.

Standing in front of the reptilium at the London zoo, author Jeremy Seal recalled one of his earliest fears: Years before, as a child, I had stood in this same doorway. I remember how I had imagined within a bottomless pit overflowing with snakes, plaits of snakes spilling on to the shiny floor to entangle themselves and slither numberless down long corridors, and the images had stopped me in my tracks. My palms had prickled with sweat and tears had welled up in my eyes, and thirty years later little had changed. His paranoia was such that he had become convinced that he would, sooner or later, die of snakebite.

To the average Joe, taking up residence in Ireland or some equally snake-free place would seem the prudent course, but then Jeremy Seal is not the average Joe. Having trekked all over Turkey a few years back in search of an elusive fez (A Fez of the Heart), Seal now takes us on a herpetological tour of such exotic locales as India, Kenya, Australia, and Alabama. Alabama, exotic? You bet, for in the northeast corner of the state, and in contiguous Tennessee and Georgia, are Pentecostal churches whose members routinely handle poisonous snakes in the name of faith. Seal chronicles the murder trial of a misguided minister who attempts to murder his wife by means of snakebite and then pass it off as suicide; in another vignette, he visits a country church to watch the handling of serpents firsthand. He chases the deadly taipan in Far North Australia, the hooded cobra in southern India, and in Kenya, the lethal black mamba. With equal doses of humor and, um, venom, Snakebite Survivors’ Club offers the reader as close a look at our slithery friends as he or she will likely ever want.

In an equally perilous part of the world specifically, the Brazilian rainforest nature writer and NPR commentator Sy Montgomery (Spell of the Tiger: The Man-Eaters of Sundarbans) pursues an altogether friendlier species, the pink freshwater dolphin (known locally as boto ) of the Amazon basin. Comparatively little is known about this rare species; the aquatic mammal is far better known in folklore than in fact. According to Amazonian legend, the dolphin can assume human shape and walk unrecognized on shore; it can even take a human lover. The danger in this is that the human half of the equation may be lured back to the dolphin’s homeland, Encantada (Portuguese for enchanted ), never to return to land.

Little research has been done on pink dolphins; their habitat is murky and piranha-infested, the creatures themselves are somewhat elusive and shy, and the rapid changes to the rainforest region have profoundly disturbed their normal patterns of life. Still, Montgomery is determined to view the dolphins, to add to the base of knowledge on their habits, and to forge a tentative cross-species bond with them: Within three minutes of our arrival, the dolphins appeared. I swam out to them, perhaps a quarter mile. All seven botos appeared, blowing, pulling their heads from the water to look One of the medium grays rolled on his back, waving his flippers, and then turned, flipping his tail. Moments later Montgomery discovered that the nearby fisherman’s net yielded two four-inch piranhas.

Seal’s easy humor and laid-back approach contrasts with Montgomery’s conservationist zeal and fascination with the occult, but each offers a rare look at far-off lands and the unusual creatures who call them home.

Bruce Tierney writes from Hendersonville, Tennessee.