Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers Book Reviews

Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers by John Burroughs Book Summary

This book contain collection of 15 Short Stories
Squirrels The Chipmunk The Woodchuck The Rabbit and the Hare The Muskrat The Skunk The Fox The Weasel The Mink The Raccoon The Porcupine The Opossum Wild Mice Glimpses of Wild Life A Life of Fear
About the Author

As seven-year-old John Burroughs explored the woods one day, his attention was arrested by a small blue warbler with a white spot on its wing. The sight of this strange bird thrilled him as no other bird before and awakened within him a resolve to know more about the birds some day.

John went back to the work on his father's farm, for there were hundreds of chores to be done. He milked the cows, chopped wood, gathered sap from the maple trees, helped his mother churn butter, threshed flax to be made into home-spun shirts (how they scratched the skin!) and took part in the sheep-shearing which provided wool clothes for the winter. This farm, his birthplace, stood on the slope of Old Clump (later renamed Burroughs Mountain) in the Catskills, just above the village of Roxbury, New York.

Of the ten Burroughs children, John was the only one who, as his father said, "took to larnin'." The others, like their parents, barely learned to read and write. Even John was not thought a brilliant scholar in the rural schools he attended, being a poor speller. But he was determined to learn. Once, when his father refused to get him a grammar, he earned enough money to buy one by making small cakes of maple sugar and peddling them in the village.

At seventeen he left home in search of work and further knowledge. For nine years he taught school in various communities, mostly in New York state, completing his meagre schooling with a few months' study at the Ashland Collegiate Institute in Greene County and at Cooperstown Seminary. During this time he married (at twenty) Ursula North, of Olive, New York, and began to write nature essays. His boyhood interest in birds was reawakened by the reading one day of Audubon's bird book, and he began a systematic study of feathery creatures with high enthusiasm.

At twenty-six he suddenly abandoned teaching and went to Washington, D. C., where he worked as a clerk in the Currency Bureau of the Treasury Department for nearly ten years. In Washington he formed the most important friendship of his life—with Walt Whitman, the poet, who was eighteen years his senior. It was Whitman who inspired, and even helped write, his first book, Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person. Whitman also gave the title to his first nature book, Wake-Robin.

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