books

If you are a budding naturalist and not ready to confront the beady black stare of the multiple eyes of a jumping spider, Larry Weber, a science teacher at Marshall School in Duluth, has some advice for you:

"We tend to fear that which we do not know. We tend to dislike that which we fear. We tend to hurt that which we dislike. But in the end we tend to enjoy that which we get to know."

His "Spiders of the North Woods" (2003), designed to help observers train their eyes more carefully, is one of five field guides published by Mark (Sparky) Stensaas and Rick Kollath, also of Duluth.

It all began in the late '80s, when Stensaas was working as a naturalist at Gooseberry Falls near Lake Superior. So many people asked him about agates that he began to wish he had a book he could hand them.

Nine years later, he wrote "Rock Picker's Guide to Lake Superior's North Shore" (1999) and got his friend Kollath to illustrate it. Kollath-Stensaas Publishing was born.

The press released Weber's "Butterflies of the North Woods" in 2001, and this year, in addition to the spider guide, published "Dragonflies of the North Woods" by Kurt Mead, and "Wildflowers of the BWCA and the North Shore," also by Stensaas and Kollath.

Like a prize agate, each one is a lucky find.

The company's stated goal is to publish field guides that educate people about the rocks, flowers and critters found in the North Woods, but that does little to convey the liveliness and beauty of the books.

"These are books I wanted," said Stensaas. "As a naturalist, my main motivation for publishing these micro-niche titles is that these are the books I want to have and use, and my friends want to have and use."

In focusing on the Boundary Waters Canoe Area and North Woods (including most of northern Minnesota, northern Wisconsin, the Upper Peninsula and a bit of northern Michigan, as well as a swath of Canada), readers don't have to flip through hundreds of species not found in the area.

The books can remain a friendly size: they'll fit into the pocket of your overalls or into a fanny pack.

Tiny tableaux

Although wildflower guides are as ubiquitous as fireweed, "Wildflowers of the BWCA and the North Shore" stands out in part because of Kollath's charming illustrations and tiny nature tableaux, showing flowers in the leaf litter, pond water or rock crevices in which they are commonly found. By showing specific habitats, Kollath gives readers another visual aid to help them in identification.

The detailed illustrations serve another purpose: "I don't have to write 'fuzzy stem' if you can see it in the illustration," Stensaas said.

Leaving out the lengthy descriptors leaves Stensaas more room for bits of natural history. Readers will learn about the connection between the anti-clotting drug dicoumarol and sweet clover, as well as the Swedish name for the common evening primrose, a night-blooming yellow wildflower: nattjus or night light.

It is the quality of these asides that will delight the wildflower enthusiast as well as the newcomer. In the entry on fireweed, Stensaas has included a 1944 eyewitness account about the heart of bombed-out London, from New York Herald Tribune reporter Lewis Gannet:

" . . . Cellars and courts shattered into rubble by the German raids of 1940-'41 have been taken over by an army of [fireweed plants] which have turned them into wild gardens, sometimes as gay as any tilled by human hands."

On the wing