Those of the Forest by Wallace Byron Grange (1953)

 I'm guessing this book lies in the wake of classic nature writers like John Muir and so on, though I haven't read them. It is painstaking, meditative, philosophic and in awe of the rhythms of the natural world. None of those things are negative for me, in fact they represent something close to my own attitudes, so I responded positively to it, but I can imagine others would become impatient with its slow unfolding. It takes the reader through a couple of years of the life of a family of rabbits, and of in fact an entire ecosystem, but it does this in the wild, and well into it. We are nowhere near human activity - we are deep in a wilderness forest area, where the landmarks are a ridge, a swampy area, a beaver pond made on a stream which runs into a lake, and the forest which mottles in various densities and species the whole landscape. Grange is interested in having us see the minutiae of animal, plant and weather activity which makes up the pulse of life there. He doesn't mind showing it in both its happy and less happy aspects - there is little or no anthropomorphism here, and death and want comes as baldly as does regeneration and plenty. In fact, these things are emanations of his mantra - "it's all just life" effectively. This is recognizable as science tinted with philosophy and soundly-based in essence. What he also does is talk a lot about "Creation" and the fact that he sees some sort of mystic grounding or First Cause for all these rhythms, which is a little less comfortable. He also is of course working from how biological science was understood in the early 50s, and some of his great questions have been answered, more or less. Most of the books I read are obviously about humans, because they are by them, so it's good to get out into this space and have a rest from their concerns to a reasonable extent - a big, long, slow, quiet sojourn in the Great Green. Well, it's red in tooth and claw often, too, so perhaps not always so quiet.