Acknowledgments

I thank Ben Johnson for his thoughtful comments and suggestions for the essays on mole salamanders (March, ) and spring peepers (April); Xiangtao Xu for valuable advice on carbon budgets of forested landscapes (October); and Paul Curtis for helpful advice on black bears (January) and for agreeing to the inclusion of the quotation from his email message. The Belle Sherman Writers Group (Jeff Barken, Val Bunce, Ann Gold, and David Levitsky) provided useful advice on a draft of the introduction, and John Ewer’s comments relating to the postscript were very valuable. I am grateful to two anonymous referees, whose excellent advice has improved the manuscript, to Kitty Liu, the editorial director of Comstock Publishing, for her invaluable advice and support, and to Karen Hwa and the production team at Cornell University Press for their superb work. Above all, I thank my husband, Jeremy Searle, the partner in the “we” of my essays, for his boundless enthusiasm for the local natural world and his unfailing encouragement and thoughtful comments on my writing.

A modified version of the essay “Lilies in February” (February) was published in the online magazine Monologging (https://monologging.org/say-it-with-flowers2), without any copyright restrictions for republication.