With wonder and a sense of humor, Nature Obscura author Kelly Brenner aims to help us rediscover our connection to the natural world that is just outside our front door—we just need to know where to look.

Through explorations of a rich and varied urban landscape, Brenner reveals the complex micro-habitats and surprising nature found in the middle of a city. In her hometown of Seattle, which has plowed down hills, cut through the land to connect fresh and saltwater, and paved over much of the rest, she exposes a diverse range of strange and unknown creatures.

From shore to wetland, forest to neighborhood park, and graveyard to backyard, Brenner uncovers how our land alterations have impacted nature, for good and bad, through the wildlife and plants that live alongside us, often unseen.

These stories meld together, in the same way our ecosystems, species, and human history are interconnected across the urban environment.

Back to the city, or back to nature? Seattle author David Williams shows us how we can get the best of both. Botany and bugs, geology and geese, and creeks and crows; living in a major city doesn't have to separate us from the natural world.

Stepping away from a guidebook format, Williams presents the reader with a series of essays and maps that weave personal musings, bits of humor, natural history observations, and scientific data into a multi-textured perspective of life in the city—descriptions of his journeys as a naturalist in an urban landscape.

Williams addresses questions that an observant person asks in an urban environment. What did Seattle look like before Europeans got here? How does the area's geologic past affect us? Why have some animals thrived and others languished? How are we affected by the species with whom we share the urban environment and how do we affect them?

This book captures all of the distinctive flavors of the Emerald City, urban and natural.