Watching Great Meadow

The entries carry the reader from one enticing observation to the next, month by month, season by season, from one year to the next. The great power to this cumulative approach is the revelation that we can find, in just one wetland, complexity and beauty beyond comprehension, an ever-shifting drama of interacting life. Many of the species – birds particularly – make repeat appearances, but there is no repetition in the entries. The author always finds new and fascinating behavior to report.

Readers will take pleasure and meaning from this book, along with the inescapable pain of the awareness of the marginalization and loss that affects all wild places of the day. Honest as well as celebratory, Watching Great Meadow is the journal, kept over decades, of an individual deeply devoted to the nature—literally and figuratively—of a dearly loved, intimately observed place.

Gordon Russell’s Watching Great Meadow is an eloquent, moving account of the astounding integrity and beauty of the adaptation of an ecological community in the wake of unprecedented transformation. This journal is a gift.