Once again, the genre of nature-writing provided a guaranteed refuge from all the ills of the world. Instead, there were pages and pages of marvels and wonders, chapters of thought-provoking speculation, and all of it served up with only a few unavoidable glances at the looming threats represented by catastrophic climate change. The year was full of such treats, and these were the best of them:

10 Turtles of the World: A Guide to Every Family by Jeffrey E. Lovich & Whit Gibbons (Princeton University Press) - We start off our list this year with the first of our elaborate field guides, this one to those hardiest of animal survivors, the turtles of the world in all their variety and strangeness. 

9 The Glitter in the Green: In Search of Hummingbirds by Jon Dunn (Basic Books) - In this poetic work, Jon Dunn travels all over the world in order to study and appreciate another surprisingly hardy survivor, the hummingbird. In classic natural history fashion, Dunn instructs readers all about these marvelous birds while also evoking their living world.

8 The Swallow: A Biography by Stephen Moss (Square Peg) – Stephen Moss here manages to write both an intensely English book and an invitingly international one - fitting, considering the massive regular migrations undertaken by his subject, the swallow. The book is terrific not only on the bird’s amazing natural history but also its long cultural history.

7 Sparrow Envy: A Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts by J. Drew Lanham (Hub City Press) – This oddly evocative book is a good deal more than any kind of “field guide,” being instead a series of heartfelt meditations on all the humble kinds of nature we’re all likely to encounter unthinkingly every day.

6 National Audubon Society Guide to the Birds of North America (Knopf) – The next of the field guides on our list this year is a magnificently ornate thing, not really the kind of item you’d risk damaging by shoving it in your rucksack; it’s a lavishly-illustrated version of what the National Audubon Society does better than anybody, taking readers through all the vital information on dozens of bird species.

5 The Arbornaut: A Life Discovering the Eighth Continent in the Trees Above Us  by Meg Lowman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) – As the long subtitle of Meg Lowman’s book indicates, this is the story of the specialist who did more than any other to open the upper forest canopies to scientific study (and aesthetic appreciation), where life takes on unguessed complexity and beauty.

4 Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake (Random House) – As the distressingly long subtitle of Merlin Sheldrake’s book indicates, this wonderful book is about a life form most of Sheldrake’s readers might prefer to forget: humble fungi, here presented with stunning new level of appreciation and enthusiasm.

3 From Field & Forest: An Artist’s Year in Paint and Pen by Anna Koska (Pavilion) – Just like field guides, this beautiful book by Anna Koska also continues a long tradition in nature-writing: a sensitive observer (and fine-line artist) goes out into the natural world purely to observe and bring back the account of those observations in a slim, stunning volume.

2 Rhapsody in Green by Charlotte Mendelson (Kyle Books) – As the alarmingly long subtitle of Charlotte Mendelson’s book (roughly 15,000 words, far too long to reproduce here) informs its readers, this wonderful, hilarious book is a chronicle of what happens when the whole idea of passionate, unconventional gardening turns a normal person into a green-thumbed oddball. 

1 Fox & I: An Uncommon Friendship by Catherine Raven (Spiegel & Grau) – Catherine Raven’s immensely effective and moving account of the unexpected friendship she struck up with a wild fox in the Montana wilderness, the best Nature book of 2021, is wholly convincing and immersive, full of the best kind of human-meets-nature writing.