Field notes : poems / by Margaret Rogal ; illustrations by Mike Jacobs.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

In April 1909, twenty-two-year-old Robert Silliman Judd, born and raised in Bethel, Connecticut, climbed aboard a train bound for the far northern plains where his uncle Elmer farmed in Cando, North Dakota. Robert was on his way to roam the prairie with Elmer, observing and collecting birds during the great spring migration. When librarian and poet Margaret Rogal pored over tiny notebooks-filled with detailed records of birds, nests, and eggs-that her grandfather Robert kept during his six-month stay in Cando, and when she read the letters he wrote home to his mother, father, and grandfather, she wanted to talk back, she had to, with poems, each one an exploration of a particular aspect of Robert's experience: his two families, the one in Connecticut he sorely missed, and the uncle, aunt, and young cousins he was growing attached to in North Dakota; long days behind a binder and a team of horses; and, most of all, the birds migrating by the thousands through North Dakota, alighting, it seemed, at his very feet. Wherever Robert went, always with a pencil and notebook in his pocket to record and note, he recreated with words a world that must have seemed strange as well as beautiful-he had lived only in Connecticut up to this point in his life. Those notebooks, journals, and letters are a gift for Margaret, in which her grandfather wrote about his six months of slowly and surely falling in love with northern North Dakota: not just with the family who lived there and the grueling but rewarding demands of life on a farm, but with the prairie itself-its undulating terrain, punctuated by the surprising appearance of potholes, sloughs, and coulees, its wind and mosquitoes, its yellow violets and effulgent sunsets, the sky wider and deeper than he ever imagined; and, most importantly, the dozens of bird species he observed, recorded, and collected.