At the edge of a bustling American city, hidden in plain sight, a world teems with life that most people never stop to notice. Union Bay: The Life of a City Marsh invites readers into the secret pulse of a Pacific Northwest wetland nestled against the urban sprawl of Seattle, Washington. Here, amid the cattails and murky shallows, bitterns stalk their prey, muskrats build their winter lodges, and migrating birds descend in breathtaking waves upon waters that seem, on the surface, utterly ordinary. Authors Harry Wentworth Higman and Earl J. Larrison bring this overlooked landscape into startling focus, revealing a marsh that is anything but still. Every season brings upheaval, transformation, and the relentless drama of creatures fighting to survive alongside a city that barely knows they exist.
What Higman and Larrison have captured in these pages is something rare and quietly profound: the full emotional weight of a living ecosystem observed with patience, scientific precision, and genuine wonder. The marsh breathes and shifts through their prose, seasons rolling through with an almost novelistic momentum. Spring erupts in courtship displays and territorial battles. Summer presses down with heat and abundance. Autumn strips the reeds bare and sends whole populations southward. Winter locks the bay in silence, but never in stillness. This is nature writing with real stakes, where the survival of a red-winged blackbird or the flooding of a nesting site carries the tension of something genuinely precious and irreplaceable. Readers who have never given a second glance to a marshy shoreline will find themselves suddenly, urgently caring.
Published in 1951, this book carries a weight that only deepens with time. Urban wetlands like Union Bay have become vanishingly rare, swallowed by development or degraded beyond recognition, making this portrait of one marsh's intricate vitality both a celebration and a record of what is at stake when we stop paying attention to the living world around us. For naturalists, birdwatchers, environmentalists, and anyone who has ever paused at the edge of still water and felt the pull of something ancient and alive, this book delivers something extraordinary. It teaches readers to see, to slow down, and to understand that the wildest places on earth might be hiding just beyond the city limits, waiting for someone willing to look.
