UNION BAY-THE LIFE OF A CITY MARSH

by Harry W. Higman '06 and EarlJ. Larrison. University of WashingtonPress, 1951, 315 pp; $4.00.

Union Bay is a unique study of wildlife by two sensitive nature observers. Harry Higman has spent much of his life in the out-of-doors; he is a well-known nature photographer, an experienced mountaineer, and a careful student of conservation. As a special project, he has undertaken a comprehensive record in colored movies of the bird life of Union Bay, a marsh within reach of the shadows of the University of Washington campus. It is this marsh and its wildlife that is the subject of Union Bay. Earl Larrison is a biologist who selected as his topic for his doctorial dissertation an ecological study of Mount Pilchuck in Washington. Higman and Larrison's initial collaboration produced Pilchuck—The Life ofA Mountain, a work that was at once a contribution to natural science and a fascinating study of the ecology of a wilderness region.

In Union Bay—The Life of A City Marsh, Higman and Larrison have turned their attention to an area that possesses an unusual concentration and variety of wildlife. The activities of shore birds, water fowl, and mammals—as well as lesser wildlife—are recorded through the seasons. But Union Bay is more than a checklist of the permanent residents and seasonal visitors to the marsh. It is an important study of the impact of man upon the marsh residents and the ability of the latter to adjust to man's disturbance.

This book contains much that is missed in less serious studies of wildlife. It draws from a variety of sources for information, from Pliny the Elder to the latest statistics on the sale of Duck Stamps, and it includes an excellent short discussion of the problem of conservation in the chapter on water fowl. The survival problems of specific species are discussed in terms of individual peculiarities, not from the less definite (and less useful) frame of reference of animals in the mass. The authors clearly recognize the strange perversion of values that confers the term "sportsmen" upon those men who kill to obtain trophies or emotional release, but classifies as "predators" or "vermin" those animals that kill to obtain food. An approach to wildlife conservation that has as its primary goal .sufficient abundance to permit seasonal slaughter raises special problems of adjustment among different species as well as among different regions.

Union Bay will be greatly appreciated by those interested in wildlife and the problems- of its survival. But for whatever reason that it is read, for scientific information or as a chronicle of nature, it will be highly rewarding.

NATURE WRITER: Harry W. Higman '06, co-author of "Union Bay: The Life of a City Marsh" which is reviewed here, shown canoeing in Union Bay.