Thornapples

I finished reading another book a few days ago. This one is Thornapples: The Comings, Goings, and Outdoor Doings of a Naturalist. The author is Charles Fergus, a native of Central Pennsylvania, who for years wrote the "Thornapples" column in the Pennsylvania Game News magazine. This book is a collection of some of those columns, and focuses on nature – everything from leaves and nuts to chickadees and owls to otters and porcupines to deer and black bears. In a number of those stories, Fergus also includes friends, neighbors, researchers, and game protectors to add the human aspect to the picture. The only chapter that I really didn’t care for was the last one – “Empty Days” – in which the author recounts his experiences during a two-week deer hunting season. This was the only chapter that focused on hunting, and that’s a subject that has never interested me at all. I found the other chapters very interesting and loaded with lots of fact-filled tidbits about nature in Pennsylvania.

I really enjoyed Thornapples, as many of the places Fergus discusses in the book are places that are familiar to me.