The Lost Art of Reading Nature's Signs - Tristan Gooley

This book is all about the clues your surroundings can give when you're on a hike. Mostly when you're out in nature, the woods, or open fields, but also in cities. Some of it is useful for navigation, like different constellation tricks you can use to find different cardinal directions via the stars. Some of it is more neat things to note when you're out. Such as how songbird species will use different warning calls for a threat on the ground (like you) versus a hawk or other raptor they spot circling overhead.

Chapters are generally devoted to a specific type of thing, like trees, or the moon. So Gooley will talk about how what your goal is with the hike will inform what phase of the moon would best suit it. Or about what time the moon will rise relative to sunset, and how that can be determined via what phase it's in. A lot of seems obvious once he mentions it, but if it was that obvious, I'd probably have already known about it. Or I'm an idiot.

There are a few short chapters where Gooley describes walks that he's taken at some point. He'll describe what he saw, heard, or smelled, and what that told him. He's seeing sycamores, he's moving into a riparian area. The north-facing side of the trail still has snow on it, because it's not getting direct sunlight. The lack of any clouds other than a few cirrus clouds, suggests the weather's going to hold for a while. Stuff like that.

The thing I probably found most useful was the Appendices that discuss ways to best measure angles and distances, since I am really abysmal at that stuff. I hate when people ask me how far away something across a field is from us. So the rules of thumb he include are hopefully going to be helpful on that score going forward.

'A rainbow that appears bigger than a semicircle means the antisolar point is above ground, which in turn means the sun should already have set. The sun cannot be underground so something is clearly not right. The solution is rather beautiful. This effect is caused when the sun's light is bounced off a large calm body of water, giving the effect that its light has come from below ground. Such a rainbow is a clue that there is a lake or some other calm body of water nearby.'