"Wild Delicate Seconds is an exquisite read, full of small surprises with big heartbeats. Finn’s stories are warbler-sized. They cut through the air of the mind like flames."— Gretel Ehrlich, author of The Solace of Open Spaces and The Future of Ice
"I don’t know when I have felt more captive to a suite of animal associations than I do in reading Wild Delicate Seconds. I think of Ernest Thompson Seton, both Adolf and Olaus Murie, and all of the Craigheads, written with the elegant concision of Penelope Fitzgerald and the wild whimsy of Tom Robbins. But this is Charles Finn, all by himself, except for the company of 29 memorable creatures—all the more memorable for his gem-like accounts of intimate meetings in the wild. Finn’s mastery of simile, his deep, deep attention to others around him, and his humility in the presence of his evolutionary peers make this a fine book, one I shall read over and over, give away again and again, and return to wπhen I am lonely." — Robert Michael Pyle, author of Mariposa Road and The Thunder Tree
"These brief meditations are as beautiful for what they don’t say as for what they do. Charles Finn does not pad, overreach, or over-emote. His precision accounts of wildlife encounters summon awe, wonder, and magnificence when those feelings are authentically present, but just as readily summon comedy if the encounter was, as Edward Hoagland once put it, 'like meeting a fantastically dressed mute on the road.' These are not fleeting glances: they are full-on full-bodied face-to-face invocations of the way animals and birds 'speak out by saying precisely nothing,' uncannily propelling us into 'the exact place where the world begins.'"? — David James Duncan, author of The Brothers K and My Story as Told by Water