In the Catskills

In the Catskills gathers eight of John Burroughs's finest nature essays, first published by Houghton Mifflin in 1910 with photographic illustrations by Clifton Johnson. Burroughs — nicknamed "John o' Birds" for his devotion to birdlife and often credited with creating the modern nature essay — grew up on a farm in New York's Catskill Mountains, and this collection returns again and again to that landscape: snow-covered forests, hemlock groves, trout streams, and the peak of Slide Mountain. Listeners follow him snowshoeing after a red fox, tracing the rhythms of farm life through the seasons, searching out birds' nests each spring, and camping on a bed of hemlock boughs deep in the southern Catskills. Written in Burroughs's plain, observant prose, these essays helped define American nature writing and reflect the same careful attention to the natural world that made him a friend and correspondent of Walt Whitman, John Muir, and Theodore Roosevelt. A public-domain classic, this audiobook brings Burroughs's affectionate portrait of the Catskill wilderness to a new generation of listeners.