by Susie Hairston

It is the perfect time of year to get out and enjoy the rest of the natural world. And Wild Houston: Explore the Amazing Nature in and around the Bayou City by local ecologist Suzanne Simpson and biologist John Williams is the perfect book to help you explore both familiar and new places. 

Chock full of beautiful photographs, this book is so many things at once —a natural, cultural, geological, and ecological history of our area, a reference full of fascinating facts about local flora, fauna, and fungi, and a guide to 25 fun field trips to take around town and beyond.  It is the kind of book you can grab on a weekend to find a fun place to go hike or to quickly learn more about the black bellied whistling duck you just saw in your neighbor’s pool with her ducklings. But it is also the book, when you have a little more time and want to settle down and learn more about the biodiverse place that is the Houston area, you can curl up with for an informative and entertaining read about our bayous, for example. Who wouldn’t want to keep reading a section that starts off like this,” What does Houston have in common with the Sahara Desert? The need for industrial strength cooling fans for sure. But Houston is connected to places near and far through the water cycle. . . Everyone you know lives in a watershed, and we’re all connected by the universal processes that collect, drain, and expel water.”

The section “101 Species to Know” provides a wealth of interesting information about plants, animals, and fungi such as that dragonflies can fly in excess of  30 miles per hour, the leaves of Yaupon Holly can be made into either a black or green tea, and something called “dog vomit slime mold” actually exists.

The field trips at the end of the book are organized by ecosystems. Want to see the prairie? Check out these four places. Want to hike in a  forest? Check out these 5. In addition to places most Houstonians are familiar with such as the Houston Arboretum and Nature Center, the book includes some lesser-known places to go. And even those already beloved spots are described in a way that gives fresh insight into them — a combination of trails to go on, history, wildlife to look for, and management practices that have helped conserve these areas.

Many field guides that explain the anthropological, cultural, ecological, and geologic history of an area can be dry and overly academic. Not this one. From the moment it starts with a story about a biologist finding an alligator snapping turtle in Buffalo Bayou, it reads like a series of stories, told with beautiful descriptions, dynamic language and the chatty tone of a friend dishing the dirt, that center the beings and ecosystems we co-exist with as protagonists in the tales. As an example, in a section entitled “Mischief Managed,” the authors illuminate species that come out after dark: “Many other species roam our backyard bayous after dark. To find out who’s staying up past curfew, Buffalo Bayou Partnership and Houston Wilderness deployed game cameras around urban natural areas. The usual culprits showed up quickly: armadillos waddling past a riverbank, opossums scampering over bayou mud, and feral hogs nosing for grubs in the soil.” 

Woven throughout these stories of the Houston region’s natural world is information about local conservation champions, threats to our ecosystems and wildlife as well as things we can do to protect them, including tips on what you can do to help our fellow creatures in your own backyard.