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Adventures with a Texas Naturalist
A classic since its first publication in 1947, Adventures with a Texas Naturalist distills a lifetime of patient observations of the natural world. This reprint contains a new introduction by noted nature writer Rick Bass.
Audubon Society
Backyard Bird Count
Every February, count for as little as 15 minutes in your own backyard to help expand our understanding of birds.
Bird-witched!
Birding can become an addiction. It starts when you hang a bird feeder in the backyard. Then you buy a bird book to identify the birds you see. Then, before you know it, you're keeping a life list and traveling the region, the country, perhaps even the world to catch glimpses of rare birds. Marjorie Adams's birding passion progressed through all these stages and continues today in her tenth decade. In this engaging and informative book, she looks back at her evolution into a full-fledged birder and the concurrent growth of the sport of birding, to which she contributed significantly as a founding member of the American Birding Association, a newspaper columnist on birding, and a teacher and producer of educational wildlife films with her husband and lifelong birding partner, "Red" Adams.
As one who was there from the beginning, Marjorie Adams is uniquely qualified to recount the astonishing rise of birding to a major pastime and recreational industry. She describes the founding of the American Birding Association and profiles its founder, James A. Tucker. She vividly recalls many of her and Red's birding adventures, from southern Canada to Mexico, as well as their encounters with a host of highly regarded birders, including Roger Tory Peterson, Pete Dunne, Victor Emanuel, Charles Hartshorne, and Roy Bedichek. She also explains how her and Red's love for birds led them to become conservation activists and how they produced an award-winning film on the endangered Golden-cheeked Warbler. Offering an important chapter in the story of birding in Texas and the United States, this book establishes Marjorie and Red Adams's rightful place among the leading Texas naturalists of recent decades.
As one who was there from the beginning, Marjorie Adams is uniquely qualified to recount the astonishing rise of birding to a major pastime and recreational industry. She describes the founding of the American Birding Association and profiles its founder, James A. Tucker. She vividly recalls many of her and Red's birding adventures, from southern Canada to Mexico, as well as their encounters with a host of highly regarded birders, including Roger Tory Peterson, Pete Dunne, Victor Emanuel, Charles Hartshorne, and Roy Bedichek. She also explains how her and Red's love for birds led them to become conservation activists and how they produced an award-winning film on the endangered Golden-cheeked Warbler. Offering an important chapter in the story of birding in Texas and the United States, this book establishes Marjorie and Red Adams's rightful place among the leading Texas naturalists of recent decades.
CornellLab
We believe in the power of nature to ignite discovery and inspire action.
Join us on a lifelong journey to enjoy, understand, and protect birds and the natural world.
Join us on a lifelong journey to enjoy, understand, and protect birds and the natural world.
eBird app
Find birds. Share sightings. This is a very cool app!
Family Letters
Roy Bedichek, author of Adventures with a Texas Naturalist and close friend of J. Frank Dobie and Walter Prescott Webb, loved both reading and writing letters. His often expressed wish that more letters and journals would be published has been brought to bear on his own work by his daughter-in-law, Jane Gracy Bedichek, who offers a selection of the Bedichek family correspondences.
The collection shows once again what talent Bedichek had for describing the world around him, and for expressing his opinion of that world, but they also reveal his interest and involvement in his children’s lives and his sense of humor in dealing with them, with his pets, and with the wildlife he became famous for observing. Always the letters are rare vintage Bedichek.
The collection shows once again what talent Bedichek had for describing the world around him, and for expressing his opinion of that world, but they also reveal his interest and involvement in his children’s lives and his sense of humor in dealing with them, with his pets, and with the wildlife he became famous for observing. Always the letters are rare vintage Bedichek.
Pride of Place by David Taylor
Since Roy Bedichek’s influential Adventures with a Texas Naturalist, no book has attempted to explore the uniqueness of Texas nature, or reflected the changes in the human landscape that have accelerated since Bedichek’s time. Pride of Place updates Bedichek’s discussion by acknowledging the increased urbanization and the loss of wildspace in today’s state. It joins other recent collections of regional nature writing while demonstrating what makes Texas uniquely diverse. These fourteen essays are held together by the story of Texas pride, the sense that from West Texas to the Coastal Plains, we and the landscape are important and worthy of pride, if not downright bravado.
The Letters of Roy Bedichek
Although Roy Bedichek published less than his more famous friends J. Frank Dobie and Walter Prescott Webb, he wrote voluminously and, many say, with more distinction than the others. In addition to his four published books, Bedichek produced a great number of letters through which he communicated his broad interests and deep learning to a wide variety of correspondents. Prefaced by a biographical sketch, this volume presents a collection of Bedichek letters that give us an insight into his literary and creative development.
Three Friends by William Owens
Roy Bedichek, J. Frank Dobie, and Walter Prescott Webb—a naturalist, a folklorist, and a historian—all taught at the University of Texas, lived only a few blocks apart, and saw each other almost every day. The true cement of their friendship, however, was the correspondence that makes up much of this book. They wrote not to exchange information, but to communicate ideas, to nail down the generalities of conversation, and, above all, to challenge, encourage, and stimulate one another. William A. Owens, who knew all three personally, has tied their letters together with his own observations and with transcripts of tape interviews with the men. The result is a unique book, a combination of biography and personal history that portrays not only the three friends, but the land they loved as well.
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