Decades of working with and watching New Hampshire’s woods and wildlife has left Eric Orff with a feeling that unfortunately is not very common among outdoor folks these days: Optimism.
“If you read through the book you’ll see we’ve come a long way in the half-century I was involved. From cleaning up the Merrimack (River) to restoring things like turkeys and bears, and returning terns out in the Isles of Shoals,” said Orff, who just published a collection of essays he has written since the 1990s.
“Sad as some things are – we’re losing our moose and climate change is a worry – for the most part I feel good about where we are and where we’ve come, I feel the book is a reflection of that,” he said.
The 74-year-old New Hampshire native, a graduate of UNH biology programs, had a multi-decade career as a wildlife biologist with state and federal agencies here. After he “sort of retired” he transitioned into a one-man educational source about the state’s outdoors via short videos on YouTube and Facebook.
Before that he spread the word in an older medium, the written word, which got published in various places including in the Monitor. About 50 of the essays have been gathered into a collection called “What’s Wild,” published by Portsmouth firm Peter E. Randall. He’ll have a book signing Friday, Oct. 25, at the Forest Society headquarters, 54 Portsmouth St. in Concord.
“This has been on my to-do list when I semi-retired, 17 years ago,” Orff said of the book.
As you’d expect from a collection of pieces that date back to the early 1990s, “What’s Wild” contains some anachronisms. There’s a 2001 piece about attempts to restore the Atlantic salmon to our rivers, for example, that ends with a note saying that the effort failed “and has been abandoned,” although we’re still working to restore shad.
Also out of date, but in a good way, is a 2009 piece about the pollution effects of burning coal at Merrimack Station power plant in Bow. That plant almost never runs these days and will shut completely by 2027 – although the effects of its pollution, notably mercury-tainted fish, will last far longer.
However, most of the pieces in “What’s Wild” are timeless. Sometimes that’s unfortunate, such as the 2007 essay titled “Global Warming Threatens New Hampshire Hunting and Fishing,” which is truer than ever in 2024.
More typical is his paean to hunting from a tree stand, which will resonate with any deer hunter who has sat silent in the pre-dawn hours: “A tree stand is your castle. A place to gaze over the land and places you love, and the moments you cherish as they become lodged in your memory forever.”
And there are informative essays about topics like the reality of duck boxes, estimating the age of wild animals, and the fisher, called “New Hampshire’s Rodney Dangerfield animal,” that still hold sway.
Finally, it includes a few unusual stories, like the day the Suncook River ran backward or a 2002 piece about conservation officers who dive beneath the ice of frozen lakes to retrieve the bodies of wintertime drowning victims.
“This was, this is, a wonderful time to be a wildlife biologist in New Hampshire,” he said. “That’s what the book is about.”
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