Secrets of the Woods

William J. Long's nature writing opens a window onto the secret lives of woodland creatures, revealing behaviors and personalities that most people never witness. Here is a wood mouse that dies of fright in the author's gentle hands, an otter mother teaching her babies to swim, a red squirrel with his peculiar habits. Long was not content to study animals from a distance. He crept close, watched patiently, and recorded what he saw with a naturalist's precision and a storyteller's instinct. The result is neither dry science nor sentimental fantasy, but something rarer: true accounts of animal life in its native wildness, rendered with the color and liveliness that made Long's work beloved by readers who had never before seen the wilderness as anything more than scenery. These chapters in the shy life of fields and woods invite us to look closer, to wonder, to remember that the creatures sharing our world have their own dramas, their own wisdom, their own ways of being alive.