Nature’s Calendar: A Year in the Life of a Wildlife Sanctuary

Birds led Colin Rees — a former environmental advisor for the World Bank — to Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary. There he discovered a wider love, of the natural world, so strong it led to his latest book, Nature's Calendar: A Year in the Life of a Wildlife Sanctuary . . . In Jug Bay, Rees documented an ecological year from a variety of viewpoints. His weekly visits to the park coincided with citizen science projects, sampling and surveys with volunteers or researchers. During active times in the sanctuary, he visited as often as three times a week to make his observations, which take the form of a diary of sorts, much in the style of Sand County Almanac. —Kathy Knotts, Bay Weekly Written in exquisite prose, Nature's Calendar: A Year in the Life of a Willife Sanctuary is a year-long ramble through southern Arundal County's Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary. Colin Rees entwines the delight of an explorer, the awareness of a lifelong naturalist, the scope of an historian, and the insight of a professional conservationist . . . Any nature enthusiast will appreciate the care and breadth of this book—its celebration of Jug Bay's exceptional wildlife, the esteem of its custodians and students, and an unflinching look at threats to its integrity, including climate change, invasive species, and human activity. Nature's Calendar will surprise, educate, and inspire. It's a book to be savored, studied and re-read. —Barbara Johnson, Outlook by the Bay Rees captures, in painterly prose, an entire year of nature in all of its changing beauty, fragility, brutality, and complexity . . . Filled as it is with a lifetime of knowledge and skilled observation, we can still hear in Rees's writing the infectious wonder of a young boy in Wales who fell in love with birds and went on to devote his life to the natural world. Readers should need no further convincing to go vicariously with him on this meditative yearlong excursion. —Lucie Lehmann, Wilson Journal of Ornithology