Swampwalker’s Journal: A Wetlands Year
David M. Carroll
It’s subtitled A Wetlands Year, but it took David M. Carroll nearly seven years to write Swampwalker’s Journal (Houghton Mifflin, $14), his firsthand observations of freshwatery worlds and the lives of fairy shrimp, insect larvae, turtles, salamanders and other denizens of marsh and swamp, floodplain and fen. Included is a helpful species list as well as sketches and notes, some pages actually reproduced from his journal. Without sacrificing the nature-journal flavor, Carroll reminds that habitat loss is the gravest threat to the biodiversity of wetlands, which he “inescapably came to see [as] a landscape of loss.” That, he notes, is why it took seven years to finish the book—for along the way, he became involved in the lives of his subjects, joining efforts to conserve their wetlands.
—Colleen Marzec
