front cover of Up on the River
Up on the River
People and Wildlife of the Upper Mississippi
Madson, John
University of Iowa Press, 1985
Up on the River is John Madson’s loving and often hilarious tribute to the people, animal life, and places of the Upper Mississippi. Madson’s Upper Mississippi is the part “between the saints,” from St. Louis to St. Paul, and where for thirty years he explored the bright waters of the upper reaches of the mighty river itself as well as the tangled multitude of sloughs, cuts, and side channels that wander through its wooded islands and floodplain forests.
 “Some of my best time on the River has been in the company of game wardens, biologists, commercial fishermen, clammers, trappers, hunters, and a smelly, mud-smeared coterie of river rats in general, and my views of the River are far more likely to reflect theirs than those of the transportation industry,” Madson writes of his thirty-year acquaintance with the Mississippi. Traveling mainly by canoe and johnboat, he tells of encounters between archetypal commercial fishermen and archetypal game wardens over hot fish chowder, fishing for crappies in the tops of submerged trees and for walleyes amid gale force winds, nesting and migrating herons and ducks and eagles, the histories of river logging and pearling and button making, and towboats and barges and the lives of the “ramstugenous” people who move freight on the river.
 
Learning about the Upper Mississippi via the wry tutelage of John Madson, who discovered that “whenever I am out on a river some of its freeness rubs off on me,” readers of this classic book will also come under the spell of this freeness.
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Urban Wildlife Habitats
A Landscape Perspective
Lowell W. Adams
University of Minnesota Press, 1994

Urban Wildlife Habitats was first published in 1994. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

In cities, towns, and villages, between buildings and parking lots, streets and sidewalks, and polluted streams and rivers, there is ever less space for the "natural," the plants and animals that once were at home across North America. In this first book-length study of the subject, Lowell W. Adams reviews the impact of urban and suburban growth on natural plant and animal communities and reveals how, with appropriate landscape planning and urban development, cities and towns can be made more accommodating for a wide diversity of species, including our own.

Soils and ground surface, air, water, and noise pollution, space and demographics are among the urban characteristics Adams considers in relation to wildlife. He describes changes in the composition and structure of vegetation, as native species are replaced by exotic ones, and shows how, with spreading urbanization of natural habitats, the diversity of species of plants and animals almost always declines, although the density of a few species increases. Adams contends, however, that it is possible for a wide variety of species to coexist in the metropolitan environment, and he cites a growing interest in the practice of "natural landscaping," which emphasizes the use of native species and considers the structure, pattern, and species composition of vegetation as it relates to wildlife needs. Urban habitats vary from small city parks in densely built downtowns to suburbs with large yards and considerable open space. Adams discusses the opportunities these areas—along with school yards, hospital grounds, cemeteries, individual residences, and vacant lots—provide for judicious wildlife management and for the salutary interaction of people with nature.

Lowell W. Adams is vice president of the National Institute for Urban Wildlife in Columbia, Maryland.

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