A month after my last journal entry, and the day after the first
killing frost, I sit down to an account of late September in the Far
end of the Great Alder. This is the oft-described – in my books and in
this journal – shrub swamp compartment to which many spotted turtles
retreat for the winter. This niche [...]

In mid-August I returned to the vernal pool in which I had found
abundant salamander egg masses attached in a linear fashion along the
many branchings of a limb that had fallen into the pool, when I was
conducting surveys with Colin Nevins as he documented and journaled
about his family’s 36-acre woodlot for his senior project at Proctor
Academy. [...]