Release date is 2025-10-26

The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net/

"Bosch en heide" by Jac. P. Thijsse is a natural history guide written in the early 20th century. It invites readers on seasonal rambles through Dutch forests and heaths, introducing the flora and fauna of these landscapes and explaining how they live, bloom, hunt, migrate, and interact. The tone is curious, instructive, and conservation‑minded, combining close observation with practical field notes and likely supported by illustrations.

The opening of the book frames the project as a set of nature walks and begins with an Easter trek along heath and woodland edges near water, searching for the elusive tree frog while noting early-spring life: bog rosemary, cranberry, bog myrtle, veenmosses, and a ditch crowded with toads. A found tree frog demonstrates color change and adhesive toe pads before the route shifts into leaf woods rich with delicate spring plants (starwort, Solomon’s seal, musk herb, yellow star-of-Bethlehem, lungwort, golden saxifrage, wild garlic, rapunzels) and evening birdsong capped by a bullfinch. The next section moves to June in broadleaf forest, centering on honeysuckle’s dusk opening and the hawk-moths it draws, then ranges across rarer butterflies, mimic clearwings, beetles, glow-worms, snakes, and birds like wryneck, hoopoe, cuckoo, and oriole, with vivid notes on feeding and nesting behaviors. A chapter in conifers sketches how pine woods establish and then details pests and their predators (from caterpillars, weevils, and wood wasps to helpful birds and beetles), climaxing with crossbills raiding cones and larch-aphid galls. It closes this opening stretch on the heath proper, where carnivorous sundews, butterwort, and bladderwort share wet hollows with marsh St. John’s-wort, bog asphodel, arnica, and marsh gentian, before turning to the classic heathers and the hum of honeybees and wild solitary bees that work them. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Originally published: Zaandam: Bakkerij "De Ruijter" der firma Verkade & comp., 1913