As the title says, a year in the Maine woods...excellent narrative with plenty of science and memoir as well ( )

A naturalist lives for a year in a cabin he made himself in the Maine woods. I couldn't put it down. ( )

For the last few weeks, I sat at a desk in front of a computer for eight hours each day. It wasn't much different than any other few weeks of the year. Late at night I lay in bed and read this book until my eyes began to flutter shut. I guess it was my hope that during the eight hours I was asleep I could roam the woods in my dreams and, like Heinrich Bernd, stalk kinglets in the dead of winter and climb trees to watch the ravens come in for their evening roost. Some people might be tempted to label Bernd as a curmudgeon, or at the very least, an eccentric. Certainly, his regular requests of local farmers and butchers for dead calves and spoiled meat to feed the ravens he's observing lead to some pointed questions that attempt to get at just what this guy is up to and why. Bernd doesn't avoid people; in fact, he quite regularly has visitors up to his cabin in the woods. But he does spend a lot of time alone. He chops wood. He builds a foundation for his cabin. And he looks at and listens to the natural world around him. What he finds are some pretty amazing things. It's not a particularly easy life that Bernd portrays in his journaling, but it reads much richer than this comfortable and monochromatic urban existence that I'm living at the moment. ( )

I’ve been a fan of Bernd Heinrich for several years now. I’ve read a lot of his work and have enjoyed everything I’ve had the good fortune to get my hands on. A Year in the Maine Woods was no exception; it is a lovely, relaxing, informative book. Reading it lead to an overwhelming sense of well-being mixed with an urgent longing to go out into the forest and explore on my own.

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Journal style describing his year living alone in a cabin in the Maine woods. An astute observer of all things natural but obtuse in the area of human affairs. I enjoyed reading about the simple experiments he designed to develop a deeper understanding of what he was seeing. His deviation into describing the nature of love in moths and other philosophical ramblings from an uncritical Darwinian perspective to me appeared shallow. ( )