From the sea to the Sierra

WHAT does it mean to be a Californian? While many have stood on the edge of the Pacific, the Sierra Nevada to their backs, and puzzled the relationship between this place and their identity, few puzzled more assiduously than Josiah Royce. “In California ... nature welcomes you at almost any time,” he wrote more than 100 years ago. “The union of the man and the visible universe ... is such as easily fills one’s mind with wealth of warm experience.”

Other observers -- Richard Henry Dana Jr., Charles Bukowski, Ishmael Reed -- have also written about such seamlessness, and their writing fills “Califauna: A Literary Field Guide” (Heyday Books: 328 pp., $21.95). Editors Terry Beers and Emily Elrod have compiled 52 taxonomical and literary animal portraits -- from flea to grizzly, abalone to rainbow trout -- to show how we’ve defined “our relationship to the other species with which we share our world.”

A source of awe (“I myself saw the grizzlies feeding ...as tranquilly as a flock of sheep”), amusement (“Fup was an unusual duck.... She would wobble to the door, peeping frantically, and pound on it with her bill like a deformed woodpecker”), annoyance (“fleas

“We grasp what is beautiful in a flight of snow geese rising against an overcast sky as easily as we grasp the beauty in a cello suite; and intuit, I believe, that if we allow these things to be destroyed or degraded ... we will become deeply and strangely impoverished,” writes Barry Lopez. Once the world was rich. Now it is diminished, and the best measure of this loss -- and the latest wrinkle in our identity as Californians -- is the pleasure that the writing in “Califauna” offers.

Thomas Curwen

thomas.curwen@latimes.com