Bayshore Summer: Finding Eden in a Most Unlikely Place
Product DescriptionBypassed by time and "Joisey" Shore-bound vacationers, the marshes and forests of the Bayshore constitute one of North America's last great undiscovered wild places. Sixty million people live within a tank of gas of this environmentally rich and diverse place, yet most miss out on the region's amazing spectacles.Bayshore Summeris a bridge that links the rest of the world to this timeless land. Pete Dunne acts as ambassador and tour guide, following Bayshore residents as they haul crab traps, bale salt hay, stake out deer poachers, and pick tomatoes. He examines and appreciates this fertile land, how we live off it and how all of us connect with it. From the shorebirds that converge by the thousands to gorge themselves on crab eggs to the delicious fresh produce that earned the Garden State its nickname, from the line-dropping expectancy of party boat fishing to the waterman who lives on a first-name basis with the birds around his boat,Bayshore  Summeris at once an expansive and intimate portrait of a special place, a secret Eden, and a glimpse into a world as rich as summer and enduring as a whispered promise.Amazon Exclusive: A Letter from Pete Dunne, Author ofBayshore SummerDear Amazon Reader,There was a time--and it wasn't long ago--that the Dicks and Janes and Sallys of this world went out and soaked their sneakers in streams, gleefully blackened the legs of fresh-washed jeans on rough-barked trees, and dared each other to see how many eggs were in the nest at the end of that topmost limb. Engaging the natural world  was as natural as natural could be.Then they grew up. Lived busy lives. The wonder and discovery they knew as kids became a memory, not their reality--which is sad, and a trend that as a thirty-year member of the New Jersey Audubon Society staff I have battled all my adult life.Bayshore Summer, like its predecessor,Prairie Spring, is, on the one hand, an extension of my lifelong effort to bring people and the natural world together. It's also a metaphorical knock on the door from an old friend; an invitation to come out and play in  a world that hasn't gone anywhere but out of fashion in many people's minds.I've lived on New Jersey's Delaware Bayshore for over twenty years, and I'm still discovering natural spectacles here in one of the last, great wild places along the Atlantic seaboard. This coastal region has survived people and evolved for four hundred years, and while in many respects the forests and marshes and   communities seem immune from time, I'd encourage visitors to visit soon. Time has a way of catching up on special places, just as it transforms children who once went out every summer day seeking discovery and wonder.With luck, readers will rekindle memories of wet sneakers, bark-blackened jeans, and maybe the urge to go out, once again, and engage a world where wonder and discovery lie at the fingertips of an outstretched hand.-Pete Dunne(Photo © Linda Dunne)Amazon Exclusive: Photographs to AccompanyBayshore Summer(Click on images to enlarge)Photos © Linda DunneIn late summer, swallows gather in the marshes of Delaware BayBaymen Captain Tom Pew and John Burens catching Atlantic blue crabsNew Jersey's wild and scenic Maurice RiverLinda Dunne, surrounded by a fraction of the migrating shorebirdsAn adult osprey by his presence posting notice that this territory is his