The Secret Life of the Forest by Stephen Dalton with Jill Bailey (Salem House: $24.95; 176 pp.) : In Condor Country by David Darlington (Houghton Mifflin: $15.95; 225 pp.)

Excellent nature photography has become so available that it suffers from overexposure. We have become spoiled by superb productions: television documentaries and glossy oversize books that seem to capture even the most elusive and private of creatures in their most intimate moments, all of it perfectly exposed in marvelous color. Despite a certain satiation that has set in, and an erosion of life’s mysteries, the trade-off has been worth it: Our urban population has a more realistic picture of nature than they are likely to acquire firsthand; people have--one hopes--been seduced and inspired by the charms of wildness unimpaired; and doomed biotic communities have been recorded for our grandchildren.

Stephen Dalton’s latest “photographic essay” is a gorgeous 8.5 x 11 production with 145 color photographs and accompanying paragraphs elegantly arranged and impeccably rendered on coated stock. Its subject is the great northern deciduous hardwood forest--surely one of the more photogenic and appealing biomes on the face of the Earth for those who, while reclining by the pool amid gray-green tangles of chaparral, nonetheless hark back to the mighty oaks and dappled, moist sunlight of our ancestral habitat. But here’s the catch: Dalton’s Oakwood is in Sussex, in southeastern England. It’s a fragment of an ancient forest that was occupied, and altered, by ancient Britons, Romans, Saxons and Normans. It was a home that provided wood for houses and fuel, game, wild herbs and berries. Its trees were cleared for farm plots, or coppiced to produce poles. Ironically, the intense exploitation that culminated in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the utilitarian management of the 19th Century have, in the 20th, been largely supplanted by preservation in wildwood as people have abandoned the countryside. This pattern is repeated, to varying degrees, in much of Northern Europe as well as eastern North America, where there are more acres of forest now than at any time for 150 years.

So Dalton’s forest is a foreign one . . . and yet, not really. There is a nice, unintended lesson in ecology and evolutionary biology in this book, obviously written for an English, not an American audience of nature-lovers: The Sussex forest is a sibling of one you might find in Massachusetts, or Ohio. The oaks and beeches are different species, but oaks and beeches nonetheless. The deer are roe instead of white-tailed, the jay is more buff than blue, the woodpeckers’ spots are arranged differently. The players’ roles are nearly all clearly recognizable, and largely interchangeable from one continent to the other. Where climate and soil permit, The Great North Temperate Deciduous Hardwood Forest encircles the Earth. The heroic predators, wolves and bears, have been exterminated from most regions of this biome. In some places, local performers offer variation on the theme. The cougar haunts portions of the American forest, while in eastern Siberia, the tiger--if not burning bright--still smolders. Forests like England’s, which have suffered exploitation the longest and adjoin large human populations, have lost more elements and are more severely fragmented.

In fact, there is an element of sublime illusion in “Secret Life of the Forest.” The forest fragments that still plentifully dot southern England are not really resurrections of the forest primeval. The megafauna are largely gone and will not return. Many of the summer songbirds have been decimated by habitat loss or hunting along their European migration routes, and in the Mediterranean and Africa where they winter. The hawks and falcons barely hang on against the onslaught of poachers, pesticides, and loss of prey. Alien plants and animals brought in at one time or another from America, Europe, and elsewhere have wrested pieces of the landscape from the rightful heirs: The American Eastern gray squirrel has decimated the native--and more attractive--red squirrel, while savaging nesting birds through its egg-eating habits. Pollution, especially acid rain, has silenced frogs, stripped the streams and ponds of fish, and may be robbing the very oaks of their vigor. Yet only the vaguest hint of these blights disturbs the tranquillity of this book.

For all that, Dalton’s forest vision is breathtakingly beautiful. Divided into the four seasons, his essay captures flowers, birds, mammals, greenery, and even insects with equal perfection. The paragraph-long captions are at once scientifically punctilious (some credit here goes to collaborator Jill Bailey) and without pedantry. If the presentation can be faulted at all, it is in its very perfection. These are idealized vignettes where badgers freeze in razor-sharp, perfectly lit detail, and bumblebees hover posed over blossoms, not the real forest in all its ambiguity and messiness, where wildlife is glimpsed in murky shadows while ticks and nettles all too readily make themselves known.

East of San Luis Obispo there is a collection of dry, mostly treeless and shrubless hills collectively called the Diablo and the Temblor Ranges. They are about as out-of-the-way as any place can be in Southern California. Their principal appeal--some would say their only appeal--is a singular absence of housing and the other blights of human occupation.

Not so very long ago--just a few years--this was condor country. Whether California condors had selected this region because they found something peculiarly appealing in its minimalist landscape, or because the better places had already been taken from them, I don’t believe anyone can say. Now that there are no longer such creatures as wild condors, no one may ever know.

Absent condors, possessing only oil wells as notable attractions, this piece of eastern San Luis Obispo and western Kern counties does not show great prospect for journalistic excavation of any sort, let alone environmental essay. David Darlington, however, has added a twist; as his guide to condor country he has chosen Eben McMillan. McMillan and his brother Ian are legendary to field biologists and condor lovers alike. Lifelong ranchers in the Shandon area for eight decades, they are crusty, colorful experts in natural history. They’ve probably logged more hours of condor-watching than anyone else alive; and they’ve become half-mythical heroes to legions of young conservationists. With McMillan as his guru (and often as not, his voice), Darlington uses condors as a leitmotif in his rambling polemic about land stewardship.

Condors are hardly the only species sliding toward extinction in the United States. But Americans, especially, like epitomes. Pupfish and long-toed salamanders are all well and good, but a condor is the largest land bird in North America, with a wingspan of nine feet, plenty of bird-watching friends and a recovery program as expensive as anything mounted on behalf of a single species. Heroic endangered species also attract large egos and intense controversy. In the case of the condor, the plots and subplots have been as thick as those in “Dallas.” Although experts such as the McMillans had been watching the numbers of condors decline and warning for decades of their prospective demise, it wasn’t until the 1970s that discussions about possible courses of action became animated.

There were two public positions. One position, occupied by biologists and many conservationists (most notably David Brower, then of Friends of the Earth) was that the birds should not be molested in any way, that the problem was habitat loss and environmental degradation, and that’s where efforts should be concentrated. The second position, also occupied by biologists (notably the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Condor Recovery Program) and conservationists (especially the National Audubon Society) was that it was necessary to capture birds in order to obtain physiological information and attach radio transmitters for more accurate information about movements; later to this position was added captive breeding. Some people opposed to hands-on condor management felt there was not sufficient expertise to handle condors safely; others suspected that captive breeding might result in loss of a wild population and any concern for protecting condor range; some were fundamentally repulsed by high-tech, mechanical manipulation of wildness. McMillan’s apt comment was that the condor was like a red temperature gauge in an automobile; it was telling you there was a serious problem with the engine. Monkeying with the light was not correcting the engine problem.

The “hands-on” folks pointed out that no one had discovered any simple tuning of its environment that had reversed the condor’s inexorable decline. Direct intervention, at least, bought time if it succeeded. If it failed, at worst it was simply slightly reducing the time left for Gymnogyps californianus. Having won the power struggle, the Recovery Team began capturing birds and fitting them with radios in the 1970s. Much new was learned about the haunts of condors and the fate of those that died. Although some had speculated that condors were not obtaining sufficient food from their agriculturalized landscape to grow and reproduce, the real culprits seemed to be pesticides, poisons and lead bullets--ingested while consuming deer and taken, shall we say, directly.

In the last 5 years, all remaining wild condors have been captured and removed either to the San Diego or the Los Angeles zoos for breeding. First unhatched eggs were removed, then hatchlings, and finally--as mortalities in the wild accelerated and fear that there wasn’t sufficient genetic diversity in the captives for breeding mounted--all remaining adults were removed. No one knows whether the species will breed in captivity, although Andean condors have. There are fears that without any wild birds to occupy it, protected habitat has no legal status. Perhaps these long-lived and slow-maturing birds are dependent upon cultural information to know where to go to find food, roosts, mates; that will all be lost unless some of the adults are released back to their native ranges before too long. There is a profound schism of mistrust between those biologists and conservationists who believe that wild things are only themselves in the wild, that a captive animal is a sad copy of wildness; and the zoo people who have now got themselves a champion animal, extinct in the wild, incredibly rare. In 1985, the Los Angeles Zoo violated its trust and habituated its young birds to human handlers, perhaps rendering them unfit for eventual release. Some in the business have called it a calculated move to maintain control over the birds.

The controversy masks the most important point made by Darlington, and by McMillan. Our land-use practices will make this country uninhabitable by condors and by most other creatures if they are not reversed. The McMillan Ranch, teeming with wildlife despite its aridity, stands in stark contrast to the thousands of acres surrounding it, acres that have been overgrazed, poisoned, eroded and otherwise abused for a century. The real question posed by this book is: Where can we put our condors?