I just realized that we don't have a separate thread for nature writing (fiction and nonfiction both), so perhaps we ought to start one.
While we're on the subject of animals though: what are some of your favorite books/films (or individual stories) about animals?
I read a lot about animals when I was a kid and even dreamed of becoming a zoologist
Gerald Durrell (brother of Lawrence) was an early favorite; I adored his Corfu books but also just anything he ever wrote about his travels to Africa, South America, etc. He is definitely dated, and hasn't aged well, providing some unnecessary and deeply insensitive comments about the peoples of those places (though it's always presented as a joke), but that should not detract from his observations about wildlife as such.
The Australian writer
Leslie Rees was another childhood favorite: somehow he managed to produce these short, beautiful stories about the birds and animals of his continent that were both anthropomorphic but also not so. In other words, the creatures are imbued with certain humanlike traits, and occasionally he does slip into the "he thought/she thought" nonsense, but at least they're not talking to each other like they do in fairy-tales!
Out of all the books Rees produced (and he produced many) my favorites were probably these three: The Story of Sarli the Barrier Reef Turtle (1947), Two Thumbs: The Story of a Koala (1953), and The Story of Karrawingi the Emu (1946). I still dream of an omnibus edition of his collected children's fiction: most of these books are out of print and I SO want to return to them. I don't know what happened to all of my childhood books but I only have ONE remaining (the one about the turtle).
There was also
James Oliver Curwood, whose protracted chronicles about the Alaskan and Canadian wildlife were a real pleasure to read at the time. The ones I remember most vividly were the grizzly books, I think one of them was called
Nomads of the North, or something like that.
edition.cnn.com
