Natural History Wanderings

from Golden Gate Audubon

GGAS’s Eco-Education Manager, Clay Anderson, was tasked by Western Field Ornithologists with writing a book review for famed Black birder J. Drew Lanham’s book, The Home Place: A Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature. Clay’s beautifully written review can be read by clicking here. We also recommend you check out Mr. Lanham’s stunning book. 

About Mr. Lanham’s book: Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolina—a place “easy to pass by on the way to somewhere else”—has been home to generations of Lanhams. In The Home Place, readers meet these extraordinary people, including Drew himself, who over the course of the 1970s falls in love with the natural world around him. As his passion takes flight, however, he begins to ask what it means to be “the rare bird, the oddity”—to find joy and freedom in the same land his ancestors were tied to by forced labor, and then to be a black man in a profoundly white field. If you’d like to learn more, please click here.