The Quarry Fox - and Other Critters of the Wild Catskillsby Leslie T. SharpThe Overlook Press, 2017Environmentalist and naturalist Leslie Sharp is a first-rate shaper of English prose and an indefatigable walker out in the wilderness, but more importantly, as she demonstrates in her luminous new book The Quarry Fox, she's an extremely skilled noticer. It isn't only the “critters” of the Great Western Catskills who attract this scrutiny; some of the book's best passages deal with trees and rocks, with the ways the landscape shapes the people who pay close attention to it.The Catskills present a skilled noticer with a great deal of material: this is a fully-fleshed ecosystem, complete with deer, black bear, raccoons, rabbits, squirrels, owls, raptors, three dozen species of bat, the eponymous foxes, coyotes, and, for decades, persistent but unconfirmed rumors of wolves (Catskill coyotes can get quite big and may be the source of these rumors, but you never quite know). Sharp has spent enough time wandering in this beautiful wilderness to have seen virtually everything that her critters do, and she's enthusiastically interested in all of it, filling in the natural history of the various Catskills creatures and expanding on the oddities, like the fact that the normally-clumsy woodcock exerts itself for elaborate aerial dances during mating season:

Nature, in its capacity for irony, and what can sometimes seem to us humor, seems to have outdone itself with the woodcock's spectacular display. But then, what better way for the woodcock to distinguish himself from the rest – quite literally, to rise above the competition – than to show off how high he can fly, how compelling his spirals, how death-defying his sudden plunge, how smoothly he lands, “sticking” to the same spot from which he took off?

Even the Catskills' most dangerous and fearsome inhabitant elicits only sympathy and understanding from this generous author:

The first time I saw a black bear stretching to its full height (I guessed about six feet, though its upraised arms made it appear significantly taller), carelessly stripping fruit from the branches of a black cherry tree at the edge of the woods, I was intimidated. It was easy for me to imagine the fear Catskill settlers might have felt at such a sight – at how overwhelming the black bear, as adversary, would have seemed. But as they came to know this creature, some, at least, saw it as a friend that walked these mountains much as they did – on feet with five toes that rest of the ground as people's do.

Nearly half a century ago, writing about her own beloved nature-spot – in her case the moors and stunted forests of Nantucket – Patricia Coffin wrote that what such wild places required from their walkers and explorers was a seeing eye. “The scale is small,” she wrote, “the drama is not.” Leslie Sharp has precisely this kind of seeing eye, and she turns it on everything she encounters in The Quarry Fox. Readers who've never trekked the Catskills will feel as though they have – and in the best company, too.