cover image Margins: A Naturalist Meets Long Island Sound

Margins: A Naturalist Meets Long Island Sound

Mary Parker Buckles. North Point Press, $23 (288pp) ISBN 978-0-86547-516-8

Raised in inland Mississippi, moving to the Midwest as an adult, Buckles yearned to live by the sea. When, in the late 1980s, she at last ""landed"" along Long Island Sound, she was ""predisposed to like"" what she would find there. But ""like"" is an uncharacteristically hazy word from this talented writer, who in her first book displays an ear for the exact phrase every bit as acute as her eye for the natural phenomena that she details and celebrates. Long Island Sound, which rests on the south along its titular land mass and on the north along the Connecticut shoreline, laps against some highly developed land. Yet Buckles discovers and explores world upon world of natural wonder within suburbia, grouping them sensibly into sections on ""Land,"" ""Air,"" ""Water"" and ""Intertidal Zone."" The range of wildlife she limns could fill a museum hall, from ospreys to sea squirts to raptors to barnacles, whose ""tiny adult, which in some ways resembles a soggy Rice Krispie, is very intricately formed."" This book is a first-rate natural history, but more, for Buckles views these creatures and the settings in which they live not only with the rigor of a scientist but with the good humor and passion of one who feels deeply a part of what she surveys. So in myriad anecdotes the text reveals the behavior of the author and her friends as well, as when, one May night, Buckles joins another naturalist to watch horseshoe crabs swim, then returns a few nights later to see them mate. The ""margins"" of the title refer to the margins of the Sound but, as Buckles makes clear, the life therein is in no way marginal, no more than is this gem of science writing, cut with lapidary skill. (May)