Return to Wild America: A Yearlong Search for the Continent's Natural Soul

by Scott Weidensaul

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.

Genres: Nature, Nonfiction, Travel, Birds, Natural History, Environment, Science

432 pages, Paperback

First published November 9, 2005

About the author

Born in 1959, Scott Weidensaul (pronounced "Why-densaul") has lived almost all of his life among the long ridges and endless valleys of eastern Pennsylvania, in the heart of the central Appalachians, a landscape that has defined much of his work.

His writing career began in 1978 with a weekly natural history column in the local newspaper, the Pottsville Republican in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, where he grew up. The column soon led a fulltime reporting job, which he held until 1988, when he left to become a freelance writer specializing in nature and wildlife. (He continued to write about nature for newspapers, however, including long-running columns for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Harrisburg Patriot-News.)

Weidensaul has written more than two dozen books, including his widely acclaimed Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds (North Point 1999), which was a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize.

Weidensaul's writing has appeared in dozens of publications, including Audubon (for which he is a contributing editor), Nature Conservancy and National Wildlife, among many others. He lectures widely on conservation and nature, and directs the ornithological programs for National Audubon's famed Hog Island Center on the coast of Maine.

In addition to writing about wildlife, Weidensaul is an active field researcher whose work focuses on bird migration. Besides banding hawks each fall (something he's done for nearly 25 years), he directs a major effort to study the movements of northern saw-whet owls, one of the smallest and least-understood raptors in North America. He is also part of a continental effort to understand the rapid evolution, by several species of western hummingbirds, of a new migratory route and wintering range in the East.

- excerpted from his website

Reviews

[Megan Hart · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent view of both the good and bad things that come with our natural areas. The author gives a realistic view to what we have done to the Earth, including ripping Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg a new one for their garish tourist attractions. He describes the natural beauty and the wonderful conservation efforts being implemented to save our wild heritage. He also gives a sobering view of what we have done to our natural lands since we first colonized this beautiful continent. If you want a good eye opening view of how the country has changed from the original book "Wild America", this is an excellent choice. If you want to continue to stick your head in the sand about global warming and the atrocities committed by the Bush administration to the environment and our public lands, this is definitely not the book for you.

[Jackie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Scott Weidensaul follows the 1953 legendary journey of Roger Tory Peterson and British naturalist, James Fisher, of 100 days and 30,000 miles across North America. He highlights differences observed, which tend to be a decline of habitat, etc. for wildlife of North America. I particularly appreciate the discussion on the water problems of the Klamath Basin. It is pointed out that the Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge is the only national refuge jointly managed jointly by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Reclamation. Often the projects to support agriculture are not beneficial for wildlife ~ thus the constant conflict. Great description of the winter wren's song.

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Between 1982 and 1997, developed land in the forty-eight contiguous states increased by 25 million acres- meaning a quarter of all the open land lost since European settlement disappeared in just those 15 years."

I find facts like these mind numbing because I can’t visualize what it means. Okay, lots of development, nature paved over; but what does it actually mean? He writes, “ at this pace, by 2025 there will be 68 million more rural acres in development, an area about the size of Wyoming.” Wyoming is big, western open land big, so that helps. And the author presents all these sobering facts with exquisitely, I mean exquisitely, detailed descriptions of the flora and fauna he encounters. It is so exquisite, and this is a book that deserves the overuse of the term, that I walked outside for days looking more closely and wishing I could describe such ordinary wonders in such exquisite detail. I imagine if I were a naturalist or botanist, all the walks and hikes I traverse could be described in such a way, if I just had the words and names for everything.

The main purpose of the book is to retrace the steps of birders Roger Peterson and James Fisher who in 1953 took 100 days to travel across North America and detailed the birds and landscape they saw. It is “both tragic and unexpectedly hopeful” and EXQUISITE, as is much of Weidensaul’s writing. He talks about places I know, and places I don’t, but always, always, surprises me, educates me, and makes me love this earth even more. Snowy owls hang out at my hometown’s airport (Boston); Shenandoah National Park is within a days’ drive for half of all Americans, yet contains more old growth forest than previously reported (2.2 million acres in the East as a whole.) One of the biggest risks to the Appalachians is invasive foreign species as well as insects like the adelgid brought from Asia that have decimated the hemlocks. There is something called sudden oak death syndrome, from a fungus that has destroyed many West Coast oaks and which was accidentally sent to the East Coast on infected nursery stock; early reports say the Appalachian red oak is even more vulnerable, and could be devastating. Seeing the pine beetle devastation in Colorado has been humbling, and yet not as scary as devastation to more complex ecosystems like in the East.

The chapters on Florida cover the Everglades, the Panhandle Forests (Apalachicola) and the Dry Tortugas and were eye opening. This is definitely a time where I had the internet up and looking at maps because as descriptive as he is, I still needed visuals of the areas we are talking about, and I had no prior reference for landscape described as “sawgrass and hardwood jungle, between cypress dome and pine key,” and as 11,000 square miles of wetlands, unique on Earth, where “nowhere else on earth did water move in the famous sheetflow of the Everglades, down from the Kissimmee River during the summer rains, overflowing Lake Okeechobee, spilling out across land that sloped gently south at about six inches per a mile, forming a shallow river fifty miles wide, eighty miles from north to south, and rarely much deeper than an man’s head.” The chipping away and alterations of Florida’s “natural plumbing” seems as potentially devastating as the huge swathes of rain forest felled in other parts of the world.

I am not a birder nor a scuba diver, but even I felt a little thrill at this description: (Dry Tortugas) National Park “contains the most pristine coral reefs in the continental U.S., the best habitat for sea turtles in the country, the only American nesting colony of the magnificent frigatebird, and of course the only large sooty tern and brown noddy colonies on the continent.” I had to google all of those, and just wonder if I have ever seen one. Pretty sure I have never seen a male frigatebird, though! It is black pelican- looking bird with a large red pouch (males only) that inflates to attract a mate (sorry all you naturalists and birders who ready my casual, pathetic descriptions!) and um, magnificent is not an adjective necessarily, it is part of the name, while deserved. Just learning this makes me smile, makes me, again, love this earth even more. While the author decides the brown noddy wins the most beautiful seabird award, I will vote for the sooty tern over and over…I highly recommend the Internet Bird Collection for photos and videos of birds! http://ibc.lynxeds.com/
Over and over, I was astonished, astonished, how teeming with birds are parts of the country I have been in, and I didn’t ever know.

While I never visited the Santa Ana NWR in Texas, I was close, and if I had known! It holds over 400 species of birds (more than half the total found in North America) and more than 250 types of butterflies. I missed out, totally.
Looking at the great kiskadee, parula warbler, and hook billed kite, I decided I would become a birder. They are all lovely, with little quirks that make them so interesting, and if I am tired of photographing the landscape, I can photograph birds. A lifetime of birds!

Their foray into Mexico to Xilitla and the Sierra Gorda ( the” Fat Mountains,” part of the Sierra Madre Occidental) was also refreshingly astonishing. It is located in the temperate and tropical zones and mixes the southernmost population of black bears with the northernmost spider monkeys. Its cloud forest has more than 30 oak species and 14 pine species. Mexico has bears? And mountains 9000 feet high? Okay, I can believe that, but I had no earthly idea, and am not sure I believe it, the highest point in Mexico is the Pico de Orzaba volcano at 18,406 feet above sea level. Wow. Did not know this. Some birds encountered there:
http://ibc.lynxeds.com/files/imagecac...
http://ibc.lynxeds.com/files/imagecac...
http://ibc.lynxeds.com/files/imagecac...
http://ibc.lynxeds.com/video/brown-ba...

His visit to Grand Canyon was his first, and he was underwhelmed by the crowds and inability to find solitude, and he referenced Gordon Hempton’s One Square Inch of Silence campaign to have a one-inch part of every national park protected from human noise. It has been a while since I visited Grand Canyon, but when I went oh, 6 times, I always, always could find a place off the beaten track to sit and absorb the indescribable beauty in front of me.

“Crater Lake is where James Fisher, mild-mannered Brit and wide-eyed traveler, finally lost his patience with the American landscape. For two months, he’d been racing from one breathtaking expanse of scenic wonder to another, each more dazzling than the last, and at Crater Lake, which lay serene and impossibly blue, it finally all just seemed, well, unfair. “It’s a plot, another geological plot,” he wrote in his journal: “Western North America has these staggering examples of luck. Arizona’s Grand Canyon, California’s Yosemite Valley, and now Oregon’s magic lake. All that geology can do, paraded in the pages of a living textbook. As I looked into the crater, I felt like a boxer coming up for the last round. ‘Makes you think,’ I said to Roger. But it hurt to think. The intolerable blue of the lake, which infected every snow slope, swamped with emotion my flickering power of analysis…we better not go to any more national parks.”

I lost my patience with the American landscape also, a long time ago, when confronted with its beauty. I get it. I love the way he writes about it.

“I was deep in the western Cascades, hiking through some of the finest old growth forest left in the Pacific Northwest. Anyone who’s spent even a few minutes walking among such a stand of truly ancient trees knows how the weight of age and mass presses down on you, slowing your footsteps as you crane back your head, muffling speech to a whisper. Even though the wet duff and moss ate my footsteps, I moved carefully; I even tried to clear my throat quietly. It wasn’t only the great columns of the tree trunks and the high, dimly green space far above that made ‘cathedral’ the first word I reached for in describing such a forest. It was also the recognition of being in the presence of something extraordinarily old and a little bit intimidating.
And yet, at the same time, the trees brought out in me a wholly unexpected reaction. I had a fierce desire to leap into the air, to throw my arms high with some guttural, paganistic bark of exuberance, to scramble among the moss draped nurse logs and the buttressed redcedars cackling like a happy child. The woods were thrumming with life, if lived a t a slower and more majestic pace than mine. And the tension between those two impulses –reverential silence and wild exhilaration-had me vibrating like a plucked wire.
I stopped, listening again to the wren’s ceaseless song, and suddenly I understood why he sang as long as long and as well as he did. Beneath such beauty and such life, how could he possibly sing anything less exultant?”

Just...yes. Yes. Yeah. Exactly. Amen, glory be. Yes.

[Kayla · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading this book. Weidensaul did a great job summarizing and comparing the events and observations of Peterson and Fisher on their Wild America trip in 1953 with his own trip in 2003.

It was interesting read about the various places that Weidensaul visited and sometimes sad to read about how the places have changed or to read about the past history of a place.

Reading about the beautiful Douglas fir trees in the Opal Creek Wilderness in Oregon was sad since that area burned in the Beachie Creek Fire in 2020.

Reading about the mass slaughter of seals, sea lions, and sea otters in the 1700s-1950s in Alaska was horrible. Equally horrible was the way the United States treated Alaska Natives when the U.S. bought Alaska from Russia in the 1950s.

It was interesting to read about various species of wildlife that I was not aware of along the U.S/Mexico border. And of course the bird descriptions were fun.

[Nathan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Scott Weidensaul has never been on a par, in my mind, with other writers of his ilk: not as garrulous as David Quammen or as urgent as Rachel Carson or as hard-edged as Gordon Grice. This book is more of his usual: quiet musings on a beautiful but fragile world, punctuated by calm and reasoned pleas to preserve it; not, to be fair, a boring or worthless subject, but limp and insipid.

In the present book, Weidensaul retraces the journeys of an obscure pair of British nationalists to gain some perspective of the ecology of the North American continent. An interesting story, if only Weidensaul had told it; instead, it becomes background noise to his own journey, which, sadly, passes by in a vague smear of bird sightings, quirky-but-undistinguished characters and mushy, insubstantial prose. It shows some life when Weidensaul takes some well-warranted shots at the Bush administration's attempts to thwart conservation efforts, but that's the only time the book shows its teeth.

If you're a fan of Weidensaul, you'll like this. If you're looking for a more substantial and serious perspective of America's natural history, or a moving and memorable portrait of the American wilderness, look elsewhere.

[Eddie Pollau · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 2003, Scott Weidensaul zigzagged across North America to visit the continent’s wildest places, retracing the same route that famed naturalist Roger Tory Peterson and his friend James Fisher took 50 years earlier in 1953. Weidensaul compares his sojourn to Peterson’s along the way to see how the environment has changed since Peterson’s sojourn and to speculate about how much they’ll change in the future.

Quick disclaimer: this book was the longest resident of my Currently Reading shelf. I have been making my way through it piecemeal since 2018. My recollection of the first half is poor due to the corrosive passage of time and paltry note taking. Therefore, this report is biased toward page 200 onward.

Return to Wild America combines the adventure and intrigue of a travel narrative with the educational value of a pop science text. On a technical level, Weidensaul’s prose is clear and descriptive, making even the drier parts about the history of American environmental policy easy to follow. The historical overviews of the places he visits lay out how critically important good policy is for environmental protection and how devastating the decisions of a single presidential administration can be, a lesson that felt unfortunately timely.

He laments the irrevocable loss of myriad species (like jaguars in the southwest) and landscapes (like the old-growth tracts outside of Olympic National Park) since and before Peterson’s 1953 trip.

He also struggles with the contradiction between necessary, comprehensive management of wild places with the idea of wilderness itself. About AC9, one of the last California Condors to be captured and later re-released, he writes, “I wondered if the old critics of the captive breeding program had a point (...) when they warned of the permanent loss of something ineffable but important (...) when AC9 was captured and that even his eventual release could not make whole.” (Page 229) In the process of protecting wild places, do they lose their wildness? Weidensaul mulls over this and other underexplored questions that straddle the line between conservation and philosophy over the course of the trip, a process that leads him to some troubling conclusions.

Wilderness isn’t just a boundary line on a map or a legal term for a place that meets specific biological criteria as defined by the US Forest Service–it’s a virtue that human beings bestow onto places that feel “pure.” The mere idea of an uninhabited remote wilderness is comforting because it allows us to believe that there are still places which survive independent of human influence. Return to Wild America reluctantly dismantles that comfort for both reader and Weidensaul. An undercurrent of dismay and overwhelming responsibility pervades the book, a dawning certainty that there are no more such places–we really are responsible for everything.

My only criticism of the book is that the short, final chapter was kind of weak. The hopeful ending felt forced and hollow, though I do understand wanting to end the book (and the journey) on a hopeful note even if his travels might’ve inspired more queasy uncertainty than anything. “(...) Even when we do try to let knowledge and the long-term good guide our choices, we often make the wrong one anyway…But because we lack the luxury of time, we’re forced to take our best shot.” (Page 348) There’s so little good news about the environment, and Weidensaul usually manages to highlight the few success stories while simultaneously emphasizing how easily progress can be undone and how far we still have to go. The last chapter just didn’t really do it for me, especially the final lines where he agrees with Fisher’s appraisal of Americans as “landlords so worthy of their land.” I doubt that was true even in 1953, but in 2025? Yeah, no.

“I didn’t want to go; I was leaving before I knew the ending.” (Page 348)

Despite being 20 years old, Return to Wild America is more relevant now than at publication. It stands as an exceptional work of environmental journalism and, between this book and A World on the Wing, solidifies Scott Weidensaul as one of the best nonfiction authors writing today.

[William Schram · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1955, two authors wrote a book named Wild America. Birding guru Roger Tory Peterson and noted British naturalist James Fisher set out on a legendary journey. The authors trekked thirty-thousand miles across North America, and they covered the distance in one hundred days.

Fifty years later, author Scott Weidensaul wrote this book to commemorate the event. It’s called Return To Wild America, and Weidersaul retraces its steps.

I took this book out because I read almost all the other science-related books the library I frequent owns. I was an inside kid. I played outside grudgingly.

I enjoyed the book, though. Thanks for reading my review, and see you next time.

[Mary Richmond · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book—but it’s pretty depressing...

[Lainey · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Babs M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really enjoyed it.

[Erin Bowen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Weidensaul retraces Peterson and Fisher’s Wild America route in his book Return to Wild America. I think Weidensaul is a great writer and the book is interesting at times. I definitely thought this was going to be more of a birding adventure but instead it was more about America’s wilderness being lost. While some of the history is really fascinating, most of the book seems like a real downer as his focus is on over fishing and hunting, water issues and clear cutting. Perhaps if I knew going into this book that birding was on the back burner and Americas conservation and back there Off was the focus I would have enjoyed it more.

[Chris Leuchtenburg · Rating 3 out of 5]

"There was life here still -- and with it, hope." (p.192) Maybe, but not much.

Weidensaul uses a trip following Peterson's famous cross country birding trip 50 years earlier to catalog the devastation that rapacious, greedy, numerous, or just plain heedless humans have wreaked on our beleaguered natural environment. He touches most of the sad stories: over hunting and fishing, water withdrawals, clear cuts of old growth forests, etc. Only occasionally, notably in the Pacific Northwest, does he allow himself to express the joy and wonder that suffused his Living On the Wind, which I had enjoyed earlier this winter. Unfortunately, he certainly doesn't overstate the case, it just makes for a dispiriting read.

Occasionally, Weidensaul lets loose his real feelings, such as during this delicious description of the decision not to protect a population of Marbled Murrelets: "Conservation groups like Audubon attacked the move as policy based on junk science, but that's being too kind; it was the kind of sop to industry that has been a hallmark of the Bush administration, notable only for the especially shameless way in which it was done." Well said.

Frankly, the description of the Navy's attempt to persuade a court to allow it to turn a Pacific rookery into a bombing range was worth the effort of reading the book. To paraphrase, the navy observed that the bombing would be good for birders, who get so much more pleasure seeing a rare bird than a common one. In some ecstatic future, perhaps all birds will be rare.

[Julia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recounting his journey retracing the 1950s footsteps of a pair of birders/naturalists who traveled around North America in search of its wild lands, Weidensaul has penned a quiet but fervent paen and plea: a paen to the wonderful wild lands that still exist, despite the odds, throughout North America, and a plea to protect and nurture those same lands. At times depressing from its contemplation of the damage we have done to the land and wildlife, the book still manages to maintain a muted optimism; Weidensaul notes a number of examples of places or species that were thought to be irreparably damaged, and which have instead bounced back and - occasionally - flourished, thanks to determined groups fighting for them.

Even as a non-birder, I enjoyed Weidensaul's writing, much of which was at its most lyrical when describing birds. Even though he is obviously primarily interested in birds, this book does not come across as a book solely for bird enthusiasts. Rather, it is for anyone who values wilderness and the amazing addition to our heritage that North America's wild lands gives to its inhabitants.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am enjoying this book also. The previous book on Henrietta Lacks The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Covers some mid-century American history, and so does this book. Amazing are the amount of change that has occurred in the last 50-60 years. In the case of the previous book, patient rights, and healthcare in our culture. In this book, the dramatic changes in landscape, wilderness, and ecology, as well as the norms today versus then. How commonplace pollution was, and stripping the land of nature was the standard. Also surprising and interesting is hearing about the advancements and improvements since then, where the EPA or National Park or another agency policies have made dramatic improvements.

[Peg Lotvin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scott Weidensaul reprises a natural history trip made in 1953 by Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher around the outskirts of North America. Things are different, some stuff much worse some stuff with a bit of hope attached to them. Weidensaul notes that the environmental action we see so much of today had barely started in 1953. We were still killing birds by the millions with DDT back then. Today we do it by destroying their habitat. But things still give us hope. He follows many researchers around the country who are trying to determine how to live in a modern world and yet not kill off all that is beautiful about our country. It has been nearly 20 years since Wiedensaul made his tour of Wild America, time to get on the road again to see what has happened since 2005.

[Melody · Rating 3 out of 5]

Weidensaul retraces the original Wild America tour taken by Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher. Ultimately hopeful, with some white-knuckle parts about global warming and the changes that have come with human-introduced species. I've never read the original, so I don't know how this one compares. Weidensaul's a good writer and an amusing one, but one never loses sight of the fact that his overwhelming passion is birds.

[Raven · Rating 3 out of 5]

It gives me hope that there are still bits of the wild being preserved in America. The traveling that needed to take place for this trip was a great opportunity and I would love to see a fraction of the places mentioned. I actually met the author and listened to a presentation and he is as candid in person and easy to listen to as the book was easy to read.

[David Mccarrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think that this book was very interesting. I liked to read it when I was frustrated with schoolwork. Weidensaul produces a story with great imagery; I could smell the sea salt on the Aleutians. It also provided a very interesting historical perspective on what we've gained and what we've lost environmentally.

[Melissa Berninger · Rating 5 out of 5]

This (along with the book that inspired it, Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher's Wild America) is one of the best books I've read in awhile--a hopeful yet sobering picture of conversation efforts in the face of overdevelopment and refusal to take climate change seriously.

[Maryanne]

Return to Wild America: A Yearlong Search for the Continent's Natural Soul 00002007 Scott Weidensaul

[Vicki]

excellent adventure riding along with these two naturalists