My Studio Neighbors

Gibson kept a summer studio in the Connecticut woods, set apart from his house and out of sight of any other, and he worked the ground around it the way an explorer works a continent. These eight essays report what turned up: a yellow warbler that foils a cow-bird by building a second story over the intruder’s egg, the traffic on a square yard of bare earth at the foot of his studio step, the insects that gather for a honey-dew picnic, and the mechanics by which native orchids and milkweed press their visitors into hauling pollen. He wrote for readers with no training and backed the prose with his own pen-and-ink drawings, one of them following a bumblebee’s forced route through a lady’s-slipper. Gibson died in 1896, two years before the book reached print.