Hoagland is surely one of our most truthful writers about nature, one of the few who can be counted on to avoid the distracting theatricality of preaching or blaming or apocalypse-mongering. And his truthfulness doesn't rule out the pleasures of a brilliant image … or of passages of sustained inventive brio.

At times the going is admittedly harder. Hoagland sometimes lapses into routine philosophizing…. His essays on wild animals and those who study them sometimes substitute the rehearsing of worked-up data (however fascinating …) for continuous thinking about such information. The tendency to take long views becomes a little too evident. And, though this gets to be rather endearing, there's a reliance for lightness on a repertory of idioms that seems to have been retrieved from a time-capsule buried several decades ago; what other writers would now use, without visible nervousness, such words as "razz," "rib" (as a verb), "gumption...