Captain Vitus Bering, the great Danish navigator, discovered Alaska more than two hundred years ago (in 1741). He was sailing for Russia, not for his native Denmark, and Russia claimed the territory and in 1784 established furtrading posts there. For many years, Alaska was called "Russian America." In those days, there were hundreds of thousands of sea otters on the Alaskan coasts, and the fur of sea otter is by many considered the finest in the world, even finer than sable and mink.
Spiders In The Garden
Watching for their prey in the centre of a radiating geometrical snare, we often find the garden spiders. The beauty of their vertical orb-webs and the large size of these strikingly marked creatures always attract our attention during summer strolls.Jack & Jill The Vulture Twins
Probably this story of Jack and Jill, the Vulture Twins, would never have been written, if Betsy, Farmer Parsons' old brindle cow, had not refused to come up from the woods one night. But she wouldn't come, so Farmer Parsons had to go down after her.At Home With Mr. Burroughs
Youth still peered out at me in spite of his crowning thatch of silvery hair when I first met John Burroughs in 1904. As we walked together on our way to his rustic little house in the woods called "Slab-sides,"