Trees Against the Wind: The Birth of Prairie Shelterbeltsby William R. SchroederPublished by Nature SaskatchewanReview by Sandy Bonny$29.95 ISBN 9780921104377 My grandmother was born in 1921 in a dry, a treeless Saskatchewan railway town remembered despairingly, after her Scottish family relocated to Vancouver, as “a hell hole” (apologies, Tugaske!). 60 years and two generations later, my parents’ work brought them back to Saskatchewan to raise my sisters and I in Saskatoon where our favourite route home wound under Spadina’s leafy arbor, our “Tunnel of Trees.” I knew these urban elms had been planted. The shelterbelts framing point perspective along the highway signaled human engineering to me, too. But, before reading William Schroeder’s Trees Against the Wind, I vastly underestimated the scale and intentionality of the tree-planting initiatives that transformed the prairies between my grandmother’s childhood and my own. Operating 1901-2013, Canada’s “Prairie Shelterbelt Program” (PSP) distributed 600 million trees to farms in the “New West” to increase agricultural resilience by buffering wind, stabilizing soil, and managing moisture. A Scottish forester, Norman Mackenzie Ross, directed the program’s start from an Experimental Farm at Indian Head, SK. Ross’s selection and cultivation of cold- and drought-tolerant tree species is detailed engagingly by Schroeder,…

Conserving the Legacy: Wildlife Conservation in Saskatchewan 1905-2005by G. Wayne PepperPublished by Nature SaskatchewanReview by Toby A. Welch$34.95 ISBN 9780921104360 Conserving the Legacy is a physically powerful book. Weighing in at just shy of a hefty one kilogram, it packs a wallop. It is a pleasure to hold. And that is all before you get past the beautiful cover image of a male sharp-tailed grouse sparring. Once inside, it is clear that a massive amount of time, effort, and planning went into this book. It contains a tremendous volume of information detailing how wildlife was maintained during the first century of our province’s history.  In an era when anyone can toss a few random facts together, throw a dozen pages online for sale and call it a book, this piece of work stands out. It rings in at close to 400 awesome and comprehensive pages. The amount of research that went into this book is mind-blowing. Conserving the Legacy was clearly a labour of love for Pepper and it shows on every page. This is a book you can come back to often when looking for information on wildlife conservation. It never fails to inform you of something new.  I…

Backyard Bird Feeding: A Saskatchewan Guide: A Complete Guide to Year-round Bird Feeding in SaskatchewanWritten by Trevor Herriot and Myrna PearmanPublished by Nature SaskatchewanReview by Shelley A. Leedahl$19.95 ISBN 9-780921-104353 It’s apropos that a Blue Jay graces the cover of Backyard Bird Feeding: A Saskatchewan Guide: A Complete Guide to Year-round Bird Feeding in Saskatchewan. The Blue Jay is my home province’s provincial bird, and Blue Jay is also the name of Nature Saskatchewan’s quarterly publication. And did you know that these handsome birds also have such incredible memories, they hide seeds and nuts in trees or in the ground and return later to enjoy them? I can’t even remember where I left my glasses a minute ago. The seven chapters in this photograph-full softcover provide a compendium of information for those who, like bird-experts Trevor Herriot and Myrna Pearman, admire—and are inspired by—“the remarkable lives of wild birds,” and understand how it’s beneficial to birds and humans when we study, support and discuss them. “To feed birds in a mid-continental temperate place like Saskatchewan is to reach out a hand toward the untamed dramas outside our windows,” the co-authors write. This easy-to-read, school notebook-sized guide begins with a history…

Sedges (Carex) of Saskatchewan by Anna L. Leighton Published by Nature Saskatchewan Review by Sandy Bonny $19.95 ISBN 978-0-921104-29-2 Saskatchewan’s uncultivated prairie, the archetypical provincial geography, is grassland — yet many of those thin-leaves are not grasses. The sedges, or Carex, which have three sided blades as opposed to the round stems of grasses, have ‘edges’. And they increase in abundance at edges. If you have canoed through a waterside fen, recall the rough whisper of sedge blades against your hull and paddle. Hiking or hunting in the boreal forests, sedge skirt open spaces, forming thick carpets between forest stands and providing a valuable source of forage and seed to wildlife, as well as a protected habitat for flowering and medicinal plants. With over 103 native species the sedges are the largest genus of vascular plants in Saskatchewan, yet one of the least known and most difficult to identify. Sedges (Carex) of Saskatchewan, Fascicle 3 of the Flora of Saskatchewan’s compendium of provincial botany, reveals the importance of the genus and its role in each of the provincial ecozones. The volume is dedicated to John Howard Hudson (1923-2010), a botanist and educator whose detailed notes and archival specimen collection remain…

Lilies, Irises, & Orchids of Saskatchewan by Vernon L. Harms and Anna L. Leighton Published by Nature Saskatchewan Review by Sandy Bonny $ 19.95 ISBN-13 987-0-921104-28-5 There is something about flowers—from Tchaikovsky’s “Waltz of the Flowers” to Spike Jonze’s film “Adaptation,” our culture celebrates their transient beauty above the reproductive bodies of other flora. Intriguing though mushrooms and pinecones may be, they just don’t have the aura of mystique that draws floraphiles to the many-coloured monocots. In this keyed field guide from Nature Saskatchewan, professional and amateur botanists are introduced to Saskatchewan’s fifty-one species of lilies, irises and orchids, twenty-one of which are considered rare or endangered. The guide’s authors, Anna Leighton and Vernon L. Harms, are key players in the Flora of Saskatchewan Association’s volunteer-driven initiative to document the province’s flora, and in this offering they supplement detailed line drawings, colour photographs, and identification keys with interesting notes and commentary regarding the distribution and seasonal appearances of each flowering species. True to the diversity of species at large, the guide includes both native species and ‘garden-escapes.’ Thus, we see cultivated chives beside Red ‘Tiger’ Lilies in the Lily Family, and introduced German Irises alongside native Blue Flag in the…

Getting to Know Saskatchewan Lichens by Bernard de Vries Published by Nature Saskatchewan Review by Sandy Bonny $ 19.95 ISBN-978-0-921104-26-1   Working between the fields of geology, biology and naturalist fiction, I have spent a lot of time with field guides. These books are tools—a prompt to explore and a means to identify those subtle components of our natural environments that we so commonly overlook. Every now and then a guide appears that bests the beauty of its utility and brings its subject forwards as literature. “Getting to Know Saskatchewan Lichens” is a refreshingly good read—an introductory guide that effuses esteem for the patience and hardiness of its subjects.                  Author Dr. Bernard de Vries is one of Canada’s foremost lichen experts and an enthusiastic advocate for the protection of rare lichen species. “Getting to Know Saskatchewan Lichens” has been complied as a tribute to de Vries’ favorite flora and, with his broad experiences in public science education (as a teacher, university lecturer and botanical museum curator), novice naturalists are in skilled hands. Growing as symbioses of photosynthetic microbes and fungi, lichen work nutrients from wood, soil or stone, and draw water from the air. The guide’s introduction provides an…

Dragonflies & Damselflies in the Hand: An Identification Guide to Boreal Forest Odonates in Saskatchewan and Adjacent Regions by G. Hutchings and D. Halstead Published by Nature Saskatchewan Review by Colette Wheler $24.95 ISBN 978-0-921104-25-4 Nymphs, sedge sprites, meadowhawks, and jewelwings – these may sound like characters from a new fantasy novel, but they’re actually real life creatures from this special publication made possible by Nature Saskatchewan. Part field guide and part natural history, this 158 page softcover book is full of fascinating facts about dragonflies and damselflies, which together are known as odonates. Authors Gord Hutchings and Dave Halstead share their extensive knowledge, admiration, and spectacular photographs of the 49 species of dragonflies and damselflies found in the western boreal forest, an area covering the northern parts of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and a small bit of British Columbia. The book begins with a general overview of how odonates live, behave, feed, and reproduce, including an impressive account of their flying abilities – not only can they hover and fly backwards, they can reach speeds up to 35 km/h! Helpful tips are given on where and when to find these insects and how to safely “catch and release” them to…

Ferns and Fern Allies of Saskatchewan by Vernon L. Harms and Anna L. Leighton Published by Nature Saskatchewan Review by Sandy Bonny $ 19.95 ISBN-13 987-0-921104-27-8 This book provides a keyed guide to the ferns and fern allies (quillworts, club-mosses, spike-mosses and horsetails) of Saskatchewan—a boon to medicinal herbalists, fiddlehead gourmets, and environmentalists interested in the identification and preservation of rare plants and their habitats. Ferns and Fern Allies of Saskatchewan includes 58 species from all parts of the province; several are rare or endangered but many are pervasive species that will be familiar to local readers. A first flip through the book brought waves of nostalgia for afternoons spent pulling apart the black banded segments of the hollow green stalks of Equisetum hyemale, Common Scouring Rush, on the banks of the South Saskatchewan. There was also a moment of revelation: those strange brown pillars that waved above the moss beds we hid in playing ‘flags in the woods’ at summer camp were cones, the fruiting bodies of Lycopodium lagopus, Running Club Moss. The ferns that my husband and I struggle to keep from taking over our shaded urban yard belong to Matteuccia struthiopteris, the Ostrich Ferns, and I was…