From the Introduction to Return to Warden's Grove: "For three summers, I lived at Warden's Grove, a small stand of spruce at the edge of the Thelon River, Northwest Territories, which lies about one hundred and eighty air miles northeast of Great Slave Lake, sunk in the great space and silence of the Canadian north. I lived in a wilderness as vast as any in the world, quietly and with a single assistant, and I went about my business, which was scientific research. The locus of my world was a tiny fleck of trees lost in an isolated and often harsh land, and there I studied the breeding biology of the Harris's Sparrow, a songbird that nests only in the mosaic of tree and tundra vegetation that trends southeasterly for nearly fifteen hundred miles from the edge of the Arctic Ocean to Hudson Bay. I did not wander much, but stayed close to camp and sought out the birds. I watched and listened, weighed and measured - and I was where I wanted to be."
Return to Warden's Grove is a meditation on science and nature, wilderness and civilization. It is about the practice and aesthetics of research, and an argument for a worldview that transcends C. P. Snow's "Two Cultures," those of the humanities and sciences. I had lived at Warden's Grove in 1977 and 1978, during the expedition described in In the North of Our Lives, and I returned there each spring from 1989 to 1991, to conduct my dissertation research on Harris's Sparrows, and to "probe the silent places."