by David L. Witt | Feb 12, 2025 | Seton Essays
Big Flying-Squirrel This is one in an ongoing series of nature essays from Lives of Game Animals (1925-28) by Ernest Thompson Seton. It appeared in Vol. IV, pg. 384. A Hope In my quest for understanding of the little wild souls around us, I feel I am going wisely. I...
by David L. Witt | Jan 29, 2025 | Seton Essays
Untitled drawing from Lives of Game Animals by Ernest Thompson Seton As you will no doubt know, the apologia (defense) has been an important literary form for the past 2500 years. Perhaps no writer in that time has matched Seton for vigor in standing up for what he...
by David L. Witt | Nov 9, 2024 | Seton Essays
Pocket Gopher by Ernest Thompson Seton 1892 Seton was the first to publish that in some places the Pocket Gopher provides a service practiced elsewhere by earthworms: aeration of the soil. (He devoted many pages of Life-Histories of Northern Animals to...
by David L. Witt | Aug 15, 2024 | Seton Essays
Sketch and plan of a Muskrat den at Cos Cob, Conn., July, 1905, from Life-Histories of Northern Animals, 1909 What’s in a name? Apparently, the great Carl Linnaeus believed the Muskrat closely related to beavers, placing the creatures together in the genus Castor...
by David L. Witt | Jul 13, 2024 | Seton Essays
The Singing Mouse, drawing by Ernest Thompson Seton, Academy for the Love of Learning Deer mice and house mice take turns trying to invade my house. This ends badly for them (dispatching traps, never poison) but to give them their due, they keep trying. Seton...
by David L. Witt | Jul 1, 2024 | Seton Essays
Family of Beavers, Ernest Thompson Seton This is an excerpt from Life-Histories of Northern Animals published in 1910. Seton noted that the beaver has “a massive skull of the general squirrel-type.” While he did not say so, this similarity led biologists to...
