Marcia Bonta is a naturalist-writer who has lived for 20 years on a 500-acre mountaintop farm in central Pennsylvania. "Appalachian Spring" is her personal account of the coming of spring to the woods and fields of Appalachia. The book begins with spring preliminaries in January and February when grey squirrels mate and the great horned owls conduct their courtship rites. Then, with the onset of true spring, the intricacies of the season unravel day by day in journal entries that combine Bonta's own observations with the research reported by botanists, entomologists, and other natural scientists. Every aspect of the natural world catches her eye, from the life cycle of a tent caterpillar to the sex life of a jack-in-the-pulpit. But while she considers the book to be her own love song about the place and season on earth she loves most, she also mournes the continual exploitation of the natural earth by humanity for its own often superficial uses. She hopes, by recounting the wonders of the natural world, to convert others to what she calls the "third stage" in humanity's relationship with nature, that of empathy with all of nature for its own sake.