Create a Naturalist’s Guide to Nature Writing

Writers like Aldo Leopold and John Graves create thick descriptions of the landscapes they inhabit; in artful prose they not only communicate a deep knowledge of local flora and fauna but also invoke the spirit of a place.

This assignment asks you to act as a naturalist guide to a textual landscape. You will begin by identifying a passage from one of our class texts that describes sights and sounds of a natural landscape. You will then annotate the text on Poetry Genius. I will create a text for you if one does not already exist on the site.

Maps are a good place to start when trying to understand a landscape, and you might begin by thinking cartographically. You might create a Google map of the area in question, as I once did in order to introduce students to Steinbeck's California and the place that inspired the fictional setting of his novel Of Mice and Men. It would certainly be helpful to include a map of John Graves's trip down the Brazos before looking more closely at Graves's thick descriptions of certain places along the river. Along with maps, you can embed historic photographs of particular landscapes, images of visual art that evoke the kind of landscape an author describes, field recordings, and videos.

Your goal is to create a deep, sensory experience of the place a nature writer describes. Try to help the reader to see and hear and feel one of the many landscapes you've read about. Because you have access to media and a means of easily integrating media into a digital version of your text, you don't have to be an expert biologist, botanist, or ornithologist to act as a nature reader's naturalist guide.

As lyrically as Leopold and Graves write of birdsong, many readers may not yet know enough of birds to imagine the sounds of sandpipers and warblers and red-tailed hawks that soar through the pages of Leopold's Almanac and Graves's Goodbye. Recall Leopold's warm regard for the upland plover, or sandpiper, which he calls an "immemorial timepiece." On August nights, writes Leopold, the plover's mellow song is a "whistled reminder of the impending fall." Likewise, consider that Graves, limited by analog text, can only reproduce the sounds of a redbird and a Carolina wren in a form of ornithological Morse code: "Above the arching trees, it was a fine day, blue and yellow with white puffy clouds. Off to the right a redbird called:

______ ______ ______ ______

____ ____ ____,

and farther on, a Carolina wren answered him in key:

______ ______ ______ ______
__ __ __ __
____ ____ ____ ____."

Using field recordings of the plover's mellow whistle and the songs of redbirds and wrens on xeno-canto, we can enliven Leopold's and Graves's prosaic efforts. Note that I was able to find a recording of a plover from Wisconsin, where Leopold once lived and his plovers still sing. One day, maybe I will capture a recording of a plover's whistle. Then I could revise my annotation in the previous paragraph and replace the xeno-canto file with my own recording.

Imagine that another writer describes the majesty of American elms. You might annotate the proper noun "American elm" by embedding a photograph of a giant, old elm that you could easily find on the web; however, you will better understand the grandeur of a mature, American elm if you go hunting for one. Then, when you embed an image of an elm - maybe even a picture that you took of an elm you discovered - you could write about what it feels like to stand under the vast canopy of an American elm's sprawling limbs and sun-dimpled leaves.