Wandering Through Winter

A Naturalist's Record of a 20,000-Mile Journey Through the North American Winter (American Seasons, 4th Season).

With the publication of WANDERING THROUGH WINTER, Edwin Way Teale completes the ambitious project on which he has been engaged for more than twenty years. This imaginative undertaking is something no other naturalist has ever attempted, a four-volume, continent-wide survey of the American seasons. In nearly 1,400 pages the quartet of books leads the reader off the beaten path on a grand tour of the natural history of the country. Through the pages of NORTH WITH THE SPRING, JOURNEY INTO SUMMER and AUTUMN ACROSS AMERICA, hundreds of thousands of readers, here and abroad, have shared in this outstanding nature adventure of our time.

In the variety of its experiences and the diversity of the country covered, WANDERING THROUGH WINTER is one of the richest of the seasonal books. Beginning at the Silver Strand, below San Diego, in the far southwestern corner of mainland America, it follows a leisurely, winding, 20,000-mile trail to end in the extreme northeastern corner of the country, above Caribou, in Maine. With America's foremost writer-photographer-naturalist as guide, the reader encounters whooping cranes and migrating whales, longspurs on the Staked Plains of Texas, pup-fish of Death Valley and the eagles of a Mississippi ice jam. He spends a day with a witch hazel gatherer, camps in the desert, and rides on the caterpillar treads of a snow Weasel to a deer-yard in northern Maine.The same warmth, breadth of interests and freshness of viewpoint that have been features of the previous books characterize WANDERING THROUGH WINTER. The result is an original travel book as well as an unusual nature volume. "Reading Mr. Teale," Edward Weeks wrote in THE ATLANTIC, "I find myself wishing I could communicate to other Americans how much this one man's observation arouses and delectifies our appreciation of this country." The book is illustrated, as have been the previous volumes, with a generous selection of the author's photographs.