St. Petersburg Times 
Dec. 27, 1949 
The angry books descend upon me daily, like a menacing squadron of dive 
bombers. More books wing in on atomic warfare. More about Stalin and John
L. 
Lewis. More about Soviet Russia. 
Luckily we live by a lake and waterfall in the mountains of New Jersey. 
As I unwrap the books a doe is mirrored as she slips through the evergreens
to 
drink. A blue heron stands in the shallow water awaiting an unwary trout.
ie 
had egrets this year, an osprey and the seventeen-inch pileated woodpecker.
It 
has been a banner year for I have been able to photograph at close range
the 
downy young of America's most beautiful waterfowl, the wood duck. 
Such interludes together with the arrival of such books as "A Sand Uounty

Almanac" help to keep me sane in an era of international insanity. 
The late Aldo Peopold, who was both a better writer and a better naturalist

than Thoreau, felt much as I do about our overpopulated, over-mechanized,
over- 
stimulated planet. He had nothing but pity for the unobservant prisoners
of 
civilization who populate our teeming, striving cities, the bored sophisticates

who have never lifted their eyes to wedge-shaped cavalcades of wild geese,
who 
cannot interpret the hieroglyphics on new fallen snow, and who think that
a 
quail is something that one eats on toast. 
Leopold was no sentimentalist like Donald Culross Peattie. He was not a 
hermit or eccentric. He was one of the most practical and far-sighted men
who 
ever inspired our Forest Service to save some part of what was left of our
dwind- 
ling wood lot. In his final job as professor of game management at the Univers-

ity of Wisconsin he inspired hundreds of young men to go forth and preach
his 
phil&sophy. 
At his farm near the Wisconsin River he himself spent his week-ends pract-

icing what he preached. And his acute observation of every living thing upon

that farm will make any amateur naturalist like this reviewer wonder if he
can 
ever hope to become so closely attuned to wild goose and field mouse, muskrat

and white-tailet deer, grouse and blue-winged teal as was Aldo Leopold the

prophet of balanced ecology. His chapter on the sky dance of the woodcock
tops 
all the nature reporting of our generation. It is a tragedy that he did not

live to see his book in print. To me it is more important than Thoreau's

"Walden."