As my regular readers will know, I’m very keen on identifying and employing well-written field guides to a given area that are as localized as is practicable whenever one is either seeking to acquire a better understanding of the species of that area or, and this especially, when one is interested in observing a particular natural subject category in an area with which one is not familiar. I very much take this same approach with natural histories. Unfortunately, whether either of these types of books area available for any given location is highly dependent upon just how interested someone was in writing one.
Fortunately, when it comes to the northern Ohio area, Louis W. Campbell was long been very interested in doing precisely that – writing about the natural history and ecology of the area, particularly Lake Erie’s western basin. His publications about the area reach back into the 1940s. So just why I was unaware of his works after years of visiting this very location to attend The Biggest Week in American Birding each year is attributable only to my not paying sufficient attention while I’ve been there. Indeed, one would have thought that Campbell State Nature Preserve, named in his honor, would have been my first clue to look deeper into just who he was.
All that aside; the important thing is that while perusing the backlist of Ohio University Press I found his 1995 book The Marshes of Southwestern Lake Erie to be still in print. I wasted no time in acquiring a copy, read half of it on the flight from the Seattle to Cleveland, and shall no doubt be completing it and putting what I learn from it directly into use during my present Biggest Week sojourn.
