Preface This book is a field guide to everything Northwest and montane: it wraps together all of the usual field guide categories under the sun. The key is in the wrapping together, as nature's parts are infinitely intertwined. So I'm going with "Natural History" in the title to highlight that grand symbiosis, as well as to give a nod to my forebears, the science writers of earlier centuries. This is essentially an expanded and updated third edition of Cascade-Olympic Natural History . I enlarged the geographic range to include the mountains of southwestern British Columbia and coastal Oregon--mountain ranges with different geologic stories, but absolutely part of the same region as defined by what lives there. I expanded the coverage with 132 species that I could no longer bear to leave out. (How did I ever think I could skip dragonflies?) More than 100 scientific names have been updated. I haven't stopped traipsing around in the mountains, noticing new details, and coming up with new questions I have to find answers to. So revisions are salted throughout the book. And I read scientific literature as it comes out, and go to scientific conferences, gleaning countless fresh bits of information to add or adjust. In the years since the second edition, hikers have seen wolves and wolverines in the Cascades. You could be the first to spot a fisher, following their reintroduction here, or a grizzly bear. The exceedingly rare Cascades red fox, on the other hand, is seen up close by all too many National Park visitors, since a few foxes have become habituated to food handouts. That makes five charismatic carnivores with upticks in visibility. Yet threats outweigh the good news for biodiversity overall. Bees, bats, and amphibians, for example, are huge, numerous, ecologically invaluable groups of animals that are seeing dramatic declines. Salmon populations have put up exciting numbers in some years: Fraser River sockeye in 2010 and Columbia River chinook in 2015 each had their best year in almost a century. These ups and downs remain mysterious. The 2014 Fraser run, after predictions that it would rival 2010, did not. Then "the blob," a huge pool of abnormally warm water in the northeast Pacific that lasted for most of 2015, took a severe toll on that year's Fraser run. Indirectly, the blob helped make 2015 Washington's worst wildfire year since the days when fires ran unimpeded by humans. Fire is an element in the one subtle but pervasive increased emphasis in this edition: how plants, animals, fungi, rivers, fires, and glaciers are responding to climate change, and what changes scientists predict during our lifetimes. The changes seen here, both in recent decades and in the few decades to come, are milder than those in many parts of the world. But the predictions are sobering. I hope that by spreading awareness of warming's ramifications I can help spur action to progress beyond the massive release of greenhouse gases. Excerpted from Natural History of the Pacific Northwest Mountains: Timber Press Field Guide by Daniel Mathews All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.