Contemplating Nature Outside Your Door in the Sierra

Her work is one of a growing number of recently published books focusing on hyperlocal nature including Jack Gedney’s The Private Lives of Public Birds: Learning to Listen to the Birds Where We Live (2022), Margaret Renkl’s The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year (2023), and Amy Tan’s The Backyard Bird Chronicles (2024).

But Quesnel’s work adds a new twist: In addition to short pieces about the ubiquitous birds and other animals, she includes non-animal entities, like algae and plants, and even rocks and other natural phenomena.

For instance, she recalls stumbling upon fields of snow “splattered with splotches of pink and streaked with red lines.” A passing hiker informs her that it is “watermelon snow” or Chlamydomonas nivalis, a cold-loving algae that can be red or green. The algae gets its common name from the color and the smell, which is reminiscent of the summer fruit (but Quesnel advises to avoid consuming it unless you want a terrible stomachache).

In another vignette, she explains the phenomenon of car-size boulders that seem to have come from nowhere. These boulders are “glacial erratics” that somehow “hitched a ride” on glacial ice tens of thousands of years ago. These boulders are a reminder of “an age long gone, but even more astonishing, we see, right before our eyes, that era’s remains.”

Quesnel’s observations largely focus on the subject itself, whether it’s watching mountain chickadees cache food for the winter or witnessing a black bear climb a ponderosa pine to raid a woodpecker hole for a snack. Aside from her own observations, the descriptions focus on the natural being’s behavior or origins instead of its impact on humanity, which many books tend to fixate on. She’s letting nature take the lead, focusing on the animal, plant, or rock on its own terms.

This approach sometimes may lead to unanswered questions. For instance, in her chapter “Coyote” she writes: “As for coyote family dynamics, coyotes are monstrous — one heat during the breeding season — mating between January and March.” However, she does not go into how exactly coyotes’ family dynamics are monstrous. Are these monogamous canines perpetually pregnant? Do male coyotes kill others’ offspring, like lions do? She doesn’t say. It would have been helpful if this thought had been developed further.

In the chapter “Western Amazon Ant,” she explores how this particular ant species kidnaps and enslaves other ants’ young. She concludes the chapter: “In the case of Amazon ants, their reproduction and survival depend completely on invading another colony, stealing its young, and returning home with a new group of future slaves. In [EO] Wilson’s own words: ‘Cooperating instinctively is what ants do.’” It’s a brusque ending to a harsh vignette about the cruelty of nature. How are we supposed to interpret this “slavery” with Wilson’s remark? Nature is cruel but ants have their own way of living? The section feels unfinished, with things left unsaid.

While there may be loose ends in some vignettes, overall the book brings us a little closer to the smaller spheres in Quesnel’s part of the Sierra Nevada. Revelations about cryophilic algae, glacier-riding boulders, and even the habits of overwintering chickadees help make us remember our wonder of the natural world. In her afterword, she advises: “Being engaged with nature is twofold. Being in awe, and being educated.”