A guide to plants, animals and habitats
It’s a little unorthodox for authors to review their own books. But NatureSE-AK is probably the best place to start, for newbies or aficionados, in a literary exploration of the Alaskan rain forest. After all, its 3 grey-haired authors have been working on it for (as of 2025) about a third of a century. Here’s an example, pages 44 and 45:
Sample spread from the Old growth chapter of the 3rd edition
Our Table of contents has remained much the same through 3 editions: Habitats ● Mammals ● Birds● Amphibians ● Fish ● Invertebrates ● Fungi & lichens ● Plants. But that belies the enormity of upgrades. Over 100 new ink drawings and 52 new sidebars were added to the third edition. If you only own edition 1 or 2 (first-ed breaching whale; second-ed Mark Kelly glacier), first, thank you for (as Bob put it to Rita & me so long ago) helping to almost re-imburse our photocopy expenses! But please, retire those whale-&-glacier covers, like honored old-horses to pasture, and get the third (sleepy eagle cover). If you can’t afford it, or to your credit disapprove of paper waste. . . .
. . . Bob Armstrong has uploaded a digital version of Nature-SE to his amazingly comprehensive NatureBob: So now you can even have it as a free 17MB optimized pdf on your phone! (Against all expectations, my stipple drawings actually looked fine after crunching the pdf to around 10 times smaller!)
