When you learn about something it often makes you love it more.  So… I encourage you to learn about winter!  Here are three books we have on our shelves at Audubon:

I enjoy the Stokes’ guides in general, and this one in particular. Each chapter gives you background about things you will see when you take a walk outside.  The chapter titles are Winter Weeds, Snow, Wintering Trees, Evidence of Insects, Winter’s Birds and Abandonned Nests, Mushrooms in Winter, Tracks in the Snow, and Woodland Evergreen plants.

You can peek inside this book at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0316817236/ref=sib_dp_pt/002-8215354-2480805#reader-link

Discover Nature in Winter by Elizabeth Lawlor is geared toward teachers and parents who want to DO science with their kids, even though it is winter and supposed “normal” people just stay inside.  The subtitle kind of gives you a hint of how the inside is organized:  Things to Know and Things to Do.

There are two sections to the book.  “The Scene” has chapters on winter in general, snow, and the winter sky.  “The Life” includes chapters on deciduous trees, evergreen trees, winter weeds, insects, birds, and mammals.  Amazon has a “search inside” feature for this book, which you can look at here:  http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/081172719X/ref=sib_dp_pt/002-8215354-2480805#reader-link

I would consider the two books above interpretive.  The authors take fairly common winter scenes and interpret them giving you a little more understanding of what you are seeing.  If you want to go deeper than that, try Winter World – The Ingenuity of Animal Survival.  Author Bernd Heinrich is a scientist, and his book is rather more scientific.  There are 25 chapters with intriguing titles like Snow and the Subnivean Space, Torpid Turtles Under Ice, and Of Bats and Butterflies and Cold Storage.  Heinrich is going to tell you about things that you might not see on your winter walk, but you may have wondered about.

Peek inside: http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0060957379/ref=sib_dp_pt/002-8215354-2480805#reader-link.

You should ask Santa for all three!  Read them and then maybe you will love winter as much as I do!