Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers

A charming book of short essays on woods animals, including squirrels, the chipmunk, the raccoon, the skunk, the porcupine, the muskrat, the weasel, the opossum, the fox, the jumping mouse, the rabbit and others, along with chapters 'Glimpses of Wild Life' and 'A Life of Fear'. John Burroughs was one of the earliest and most articulate pioneers of the United States conservation movement, publishing twenty-eight books on the natural world during the height of the Industrial Revolution. As an author, teacher, and poet, he wrote with intimacy and feeling, illustrating verbal landscapes and providing philosophical insights about the environment. People by the hundreds of thousands relished his writings. His friends included Walt Whitman, Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Edison, and John Muir. Burroughs was dedicated to studying the world and making nature come to life on the written page. In the last decades of the 19th century, his prolific nature essays helped spawn the Nature Study movement and made him an international celebrity.