Scott Weidensaul biography

Scott Weidensaul Biography

Born in 1959, Scott Weidensaul has lived almost all of his life among the long ridges and endless valleys of eastern Pennsylvania, in the heart of the central Appalachians, a landscape that has defined much of his work.

His writing career began in 1978 with a weekly natural history column in the local newspaper, the Pottsville Republican in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, where he grew up. The column soon led a fulltime reporting job, which he held until 1988, when he left to become a freelance writer specializing in nature and wildlife. (He continued to write on nature for newspapers, however, including long-running columns for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Harrisburg Patriot-News.)

Weidensaul has written more than two dozen books on natural history, including his widely acclaimed Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds (North Point 1999), which was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. Other recent titles include The Ghost with Trembling Wings: Science, Wishful Thinking and the Search for Lost Species (North Point 2002), about the search for animals that may or may not be extinct; Return to Wild America: A Yearlong Search for the Continent's Natural Soul (North Point 2005), an ambitious journey to take the pulse of America's wildlife and wildlands, and The First Frontier: The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery and Endurance in Early America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2012).

Weidensaul's writing has appeared in dozens of publications, including Smithsonian, the New York Times, Nature Conservancy, National Wildlife and Audubon, among many others. He lectures widely on conservation and nature.

In addition to writing about wildlife, Weidensaul is an active field researcher whose work focuses on bird migration. Besides banding hawks each fall (something he's done for almost 20 years), he directs a major effort to study the movements of northern saw-whet owls, one of the smallest and least-understood raptors in North America. Most recently, he has joined a continental effort to understand the rapid evolution, by several species of western hummingbirds, of a new migratory route and wintering range in the East.

He lives in the Pennsylvania Appalachians.

Scott Weidensaul's website

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