Jahreszeitliches Wanderbuch I-IV

Nature guides today (like almost all media) are subject to the strict compulsion to use colourful pictures and therefore usually present themselves with a lot of photos and little text - as if they did not want to and should not awaken the need to see, but rather satisfy it themselves for the sake of convenience and as a substitute. Heinrich Grupe's incomparable "Naturkundlicher Wanderführer" was published for the last time in the 1960s, and that was - Jürgen Dahl mentions it in his foreword - the last time the book was published.Jürgen Dahl mentions in his foreword - around the time when school biology lessons turned away from lesser celandine and kestrel and towards deoxyribonucleic acid - which was not particularly conducive to biochemical education, but quite detrimental to the stock of everyday natural history knowledge. So "Der Grupe" is not a picture book, but it is also not one of those "identification books" with whose help one learns to climb through Linné's systematics more or less laboriously on the basis of flower colour and leaf positions. Rather, it is a walking book that accompanies you as an old, very experienced nature lover does. It teaches you to see by drawing your attention again and again to what you have overlooked, it teaches you to ask, and it gives answers that arouse further curiosity. For example: What animal ate at this cone? What animal lives in this burrow? How old is this spruce shelter? How can you recognise trees and shrubs in winter? Where it helps to determine, it does so with the same didactic aplomb: A bird singing in flight in a clearing? (Not difficult, only four come into question: tree pipit, warbler, serin or lark - and they are easy to distinguish). The book's usefulness is unusual and cannot be compared with today's nature guides; its content of easily usable information is inexhaustible for the layman.In addition, it arouses curiosity and the desire to ask questions, and with its almost magical seductive power it literally lures the notorious homebody out from behind the stove (and - just as contemporary - the constant surfer out of the net).