On Monday, July 23, the JLT Natural History Society book club will meet to discuss Saving Tarboo Creek by Scott and Susan Leopold Freeman. We will meet at the Ilahee Preserve from 3:30-5:00.

This book is the story of the Freeman family’s efforts  to restore damaged Tarboo Creek on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula—to transform it from a drainage ditch into a stream that could again nurture salmon.  That story is interwoven with universal lessons about how we can all live more constructive, fulfilling, and natural lives by engaging with the land rather than exploiting it. In the proud tradition of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, Saving Tarboo Creek is both a timely tribute to our land and a bold challenge to protect it.

On Monday, June 25, 2018, the Jefferson Land Trust Natural History Society book club will discuss John Steinbeck’s classic The Log from the Sea of Cortez.  We will meet at Ilahee Preserve at 3:30-5:00.

(Directions to Ilahee Preserve — From Highway 19 near Port Hadlock, turn on Prospect Avenue toward Kala Point.  Then turn right on Creek View Lane.  Preserve and parking lot are at end of dirt road.)

This book is a day-by-day account of the specimen-collecting expedition in the Gulf of California taken by John Steinbeck and his close friend, biologist Ed Ricketts in 1940.  The book is a  blend of science, philosophy, and high-spirited adventure. The boat used for this journey was the Western Flyer,  now being restored in the boatyard in Port Townsend.

On Monday, May 21, 2018, 3:30-5:00, the Natural History Society book club will meet at the Pink House next to the Carnegie Library in Port Townsend. (We are meeting early in May because the following weekend is Memorial Day.)

The book selection for May is Mozart’s Starling by Lyanda Lynn Haupt.

Author Lyanda Lynn Haupt is already familiar to book club readers, as we have read two of her previous books — Crow Planet and The Urban Bestiary.

In Mozart’s Starling Lyanda Haupt describes the bond between Mozart and one of the world’s most common, and most reviled, birds.  That story is intertwined with Haupt’s own experience of rescuing a baby starling and  then living with that bird.  Haupt is a birder and a conservationist who well recognizes that the starling is an unpopular, nonnative, invasive species, as she relates her and Mozart’s relationships with individual starlings.

The book is a blend of memoir, natural history, and biography.  Like other books by Haupt, Mozart’s Starling encourages readers to examine humans’ awareness of their place in the world.

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The Natural History Society Book Club will meet on Monday, April 23, 3:30-5:00 at the “Pink House” next to the Port Townsend Library.  We will discuss The Last Wild Edge by Susan Zwinger.

Naturalist and author Susan Zwinger travels the northwestern edge of North America, from the Arctic Circle to the Olympic rain forest.  She travels by pickup, by day hiking, by watercraft (sailboat, Zodiac, kayak), and backpacking.  Her near poetic writing describes aspects of unique wild landscapes, including tundra, glaciers, bogs, fjords.    She invites her readers “to slow down, to kneel down, to gaze long,” to examine the ecology of small organisms (lichens, liverworts, fungal mycelia) as well as  the big animals (bears, wolves, eagles) and plants (cedars, hemlocks). She observes the effects of clearcutting on ancient forests and other intrusions by human civilization into this remote edge.

In March the Natural History Society Book Club will discuss Glacial Lake Missoula and its Humongous Floods by David Alt.  We will meet at the Pink House, next to the Port Townsend Carnegie Library, on Monday, March 26, from 3:30-5:00.

Glacial Lake Missoula and Its Humongous Floods tells the tale of a huge Ice Age lake that drained suddenly, and repeatedly. In the 1920s geologist J. Harlen Bretz came to the conclusion that the dry scablands of eastern Washington were sculpted by water.  The flood waters from the broken ice dam raced across western Montana, the Idaho panhandle, eastern Washington, down the Columbia River Gorge, out to the Pacific Ocean.

The book is also the story of geologists grappling with scientific controversy, in which personalities, pride, and prejudice conflict with scientific evidence.