Sue Leaf's "The Bullhead Queen: A Year on Pioneer Lake" is in well-charted waters. There is Paul Gruchow's "Journal of a Prairie Year," which "The Bullhead Queen" emulates in time span and ecological concern. And there's Annie Dillard's "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," which Leaf's book emulates in wonder and humor.

But "The Bullhead Queen" isn't a repeated ripple in the "Nature/Essays" genre. It belongs completely to Leaf (and to Minnesota) in voice, joys and questioning. It's a collection of essays only a Lutheran zoologist raised in St. Paul and living in Chisago County could write.

Following the liturgical calendar and the seasons, Leaf charts a year living on the partially developed shores of Pioneer Lake near Center City, Minn. On one side is the Swede-built Chisago Lake Lutheran Church, where Leaf is a member. On another is a well-used duck blind. On yet another is the water quality insult of boulder-scaping on a neighbor's shoreline. Development has driven lake lots to the million-dollar mark, but the lake itself remains unremarkable. At just 77 acres, it's about the size of Walden Pond. And that's where the similarity ends -- especially in depth (only 8 feet), clarity (nearly always murky brown) and fishing. "Henry David Thoreau caught pike and pickerel on Walden; we catch only brown, slippery bullheads," Leaf writes, later detailing the hilarious hubris of her teenage sons who hold a bullhead fishing tournament, complete with shirts that read "Pioneer Lake, Quality Bullheads Since 1998."

This lake of (seemingly) little significance is the clouded heart of Leaf's essays, and she swims through the contradictions well. As a scientist, Audubon chapter president and Lutheran, her questioning is at the intersection of science and faith through compassion's wake. Adept at both memoir and intellectual thought, Leaf leads with keen observation and expert knowledge of the natural world. In the essay "Owl Invasion," she details the recent winter when one-tenth of the North American owl population migrated through Minnesota, and uses the anomaly as an access point for thoughts on climate change, our feelings about animals and her own feelings about scientific inquiry. She is particularly gifted when writing about faith and nature, such as when she refrains from praying out loud for the owls at an ecumenical breakfast to avoid embarrassment, or when playful otters lead her to reconsider the book of Genesis in the essay "What Are Animals For?" She is often instructive, giving us the surprising ecological implications of salting roads and light pollution.

The essays are tightly written, and some moments are just plain funny, as in her snowplow reverence: "I assume the attitude appropriate to any deity: 'Thank you, O Great Snowplow, for your benevolent protection.'"

With development continually encroaching on our natural spaces, this is a good book for now. And with many of us out there who understand the thrill of the first skate on a newly frozen lake as well as the safety of sitting in the same church pew every Sunday, this is a good book for here. Compassionately intellectual and unabashedly Scandinavian Lutheran, it is uniquely Minnesotan. And Pioneer Lake may easily be considered our Walden Pond.

Stephanie Wilbur Ash is one of the writers of the Electric Arc Radio Show. She teaches freshman composition at St. Cloud State University.