In 1953, birding guru Roger Tory Peterson and noted British naturalist James Fisher set out on what became a legendary journey-a one hundred day trek over 30,000 miles around North America. They traveled from Newfoundland to Florida, deep into the heart of Mexico, through the Southwest, the Pacific Northwest, and into Alaska's Pribilof Islands. Two years later, Wild America , their classic account of the trip, was published. On the eve of that book's fiftieth anniversary, naturalist Scott Weidensaul retraces Peterson and Fisher's steps to tell the story of wild America today. How has the continent's natural landscape changed over the past fifty years? How have the wildlife, the rivers, and the rugged, untouched terrain fared? The journey takes Weidensaul to the coastal communities of Newfoundland, where he examines the devastating impact of the Atlantic cod fishery's collapse on the ecosystem; to Florida, where he charts the virtual extinction of the great wading bird colonies that Peterson and Fisher once documented; to the Mexican tropics of Xilitla, which have become a growing center of ecotourism since Fisher and Peterson's exposition. And perhaps most surprising of all, Weidensaul finds that much of what Peterson and Fisher discovered remains untouched by the industrial developments of the last fifty years. Poised to become a classic in its own right, Return to Wild America is a sweeping survey of the natural soul of North America today. “This engrossing state-of-nature memoir, making a vibrant case for preserving America's wild past for future Americans, promises to become a classic in its own right.” ― Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Scott Weidensaul ranks among an elite group of writer-naturalists-Bruce Chatwin, John McPhee and David Quammen come to mind-whose straightforward eloquence elevates ecology to the level of philosophy.” ― Janice P. Nimura, Los Angeles Times Book Review Scott Weidensaul is the author of Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds , which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Return to Wild America , The Ghost with Trembling Wings and Mountains of the Heart . He lives in the Pennsylvania Appalachians. Return to Wild America A Yearlong Search for the Continent's Natural Soul By Scott Weidensaul North Point Press Copyright © 2006 Scott Weidensaul All right reserved. ISBN: 9780865477315 ONE Atlantic Gateway I n the early 1950s, just getting to Cape St. Mary’s was an adventure. The Avalon Peninsula is the easternmost prow of North America—a vaguely H-shaped chunk of land that is very nearly an island itself, attached to the rest of Newfoundland by the slenderest of threads. It is rimmed by sheer cliffs, by beaches of dark quartz-shot cobblestones and wave-smashed capes. Where there is forest, it is somber and mossy, spruce and balsam fir hung with long pale sheets of lichen dangling from the branches like rotting curtains. But much of the Avalon is tundra, known locally as barrens—an open, windswept land home to flocks of ptarmigan and the southernmost wild caribou herd in the world, where the trees, if they grow at all, cower in dense, waist-high thickets known as tuckamore. When Fisher and Peterson met here to begin their journey, Newfoundland was very much a world apart, sparsely populated and isolated from the rest of the country not only geographically but also politically; it had confederated with Canada only four years earlier, ending its long history as a separate dominion of Great Britain. Most of the people lived in remote fishing villages called outports accessible only by sea, and beyond the handful of large towns like St. John’s the few roads were largely dirt and gravel, and at times all but disappeared into the spruce bogs. Accompanied by the local ornithologist Leslie Tuck, the two travelers spent a long day bouncing south from St. John’s on awful roads. Fisher, keyed up to see new birds, found himself “seeking the differences and finding the similarities”; the first North American species he saw was a gannet, which was also the last British species he’d seen as his plane crossed the Scottish coast. This isn’t surprising; few places in North America have as strong an Old World flavor, at least in terms of natural diversity, as Newfoundland. The landscape, Fisher thought, was strikingly similar to the spruce forests he’d known in Sweden, and of the forty-six species of birds they saw, almost two-thirds were ones he knew from Europe. He was stunned to find that the most common birdsong in the dark conifer woods was “a voice as familiar to me in my own English garden as on the cliffs of St. Kilda and the remote Shetland Islands”—that of the tiny winter wren. Though a common backyard bird in Great Britain, in North America it inhabits only the boreal forests of the North or high elevations. They spent the night in the fishing hamlet of St. Bride’s, where the navigable road ended, and the next day—with