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THE WORLD OUTSIDE MY DOOR by Olive Brown Goin

THE WORLD OUTSIDE MY DOOR

By

Pub Date: Feb. 21st, 1954
Publisher: Macmillan

A half acre in north central Florida provides the setting for this fascinating adventure in backyard biology. The wife of a herptologist found herself caught in the magic of nature's offerings as she learned to see in wholly new ways. Where? How? When? What? -- a new world unfolded, the world in which frogs and lizards, snakes and turtles pursued their own daily activities. She found fourteen varieties of amphibians and reptiles almost before she realized how fast she was learning to recognize them; before the Journal she and her husband kept was rounded out they had noted some forty species, nearly half the number possible to find in the whole of their county. Almost incredible, this, to a scientist; but the interest of her discovery for the layman lies in the unfolding of the details of what she learned, the interrelation of life and death, of feeding habits and breeding, the minute details of differences, the seasonal round. Invertebrates, birds, mammals do not go unnoted, and the whole is a reading experience that persuades one to prove to oneself that one's own half acre may be a rich laboratory of observation and discovery.