Annie Dillard is an astute observer of natural events. In her book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, she describes a memorable encounter with a frog.

...At the end of the island I noticed a small green frog. He was exactly half in and half out of the water, looking like a schematic diagram of an amphibian, and he didn't jump.

He didn't jump; I crept closer.... Just as I looked at him, he slowly crumpled and began to sag. The spirit vanished from his eyes as if snuffed. His skin emptied and dropped; his very skull seemed to collapse and settle like a kicked tent. He was shrinking before my eyes like a deflating football. I watched the taut, glistening skin on his shoulders ruck, and rumple, and fall. Soon, part of his skin, formless as a pricked balloon, lay in floating folds like bright scum on top of the water; it was a monstrous and terrifying thing. I gaped bewildered, appalled. An oval shadow hung in the water behind the drained frog; then the shadow glided away. The frog skin bag started to sink.

• What do you think happened to the frog? What appalled Dillard?

As it turns out, the frog was eaten by a giant water bug. Dillard goes on to describe how the bug manages to devour a victim larger than itself:

...Its grasping forelegs are mighty and hooked inward. It seizes a victim with these legs, hugs it tight, and paralyzes it with enzymes injected during a vicious bite. That one bite is the only bite it ever takes. Through the puncture shoot the poisons that dissolve the victim's muscles and bones and organs — all but the skin — and through it the giant water bug sucks out the victim's body, reduced to a juice.
• What was your first reaction to this passage?
• Which images remain most vivid in your mind?
• In the table below, list the particular verbs and nouns that contribute to both the strength of the writing and the apparent factual basis of the event.

• What did you learn about frogs or water bugs that you didn't know before?
• How does Dillard's description of the science involved in the water bug's capabilities and the frog's disintegration affect your willingness to believe her description?
• What specific knowledge of science adds power to this excerpt?

This passage comes from a longer piece in which Dillard contemplates a world that encompasses cruelty and pain, but also grace and beauty. It is from a chapter called "Heaven and Earth in Jest."

• What might the title suggest about Dillard's observations?
• Take a look at frogs from another perspective. Visit a scientist whose own fascination with frogs has defined his career.

In his famous novel, Moby Dick, Melville describes the sperm whale, or that awesome Leviathan, as he often refers to it. His descriptions are drawn from his direct observations of harpooners aboard a whaling vessel taking aim at their giant victims. He devoted several chapters of his novel to cetology — the study of whales. Read his description of the tail of the sperm whale:

Reckoning the largest sized Sperm Whale's tail to begin at that point of the trunk where it tapers to about the girth of a man, it comprises upon its upper surface alone, an area of at least fifty square feet. The compact round body of its root expands into two broad, firm, flat palms or flukes, gradually shoaling away to less that an inch in thickness... In no living thing are the lines of beauty more exquisitely defined than in the crescentic borders of these flukes...

But as if this vast local power in the tendinous tail were not enough, the whole bulk of the leviathan is knit over with a warp and woof of muscular fibres and filaments, which passing on either side of the loins and running down into the flukes, insensibly blend with them, and largely contribute to their might...

Nor does this — its amazing strength, at all tend to cripple the graceful flexion of its motions; where infantileness of ease undulates through a Titanism of power. On the contrary, those motions derive their most appalling beauty from it.

Word Watch: Notice that while the descriptions regarding size are very direct and literal, they are played off images of grace and beauty.

• What words and comparisons does Melville use to describe the size of the whale?
• What adjectives help us imagine the whale swimming?
• How can beauty be appalling?

Changing the Part of Speech: Although words like shoaling, crescentic, and flexion might sound unusual, the root words (shoal, crescent, flex) are not.

• What is the effect of turning these two nouns and a verb into a verb, an adjective, and a noun?

• Find at least three pairs of words in this description that make use of this literary device. What is the effect?
• How do "fibers and filaments" contrast with "warp and woof"?

Spend some time carefully watching a pet, a squirrel, a raccoon, or even an insect. Be patient, and watch closely. Write down your notes about its size, shape, color, behavior, etc.

In the table below, list characteristics/ behavior in one column. Then create a creative descriptive phrase in the second column. Use strong verbs and vivid adjectives. Try experimenting with parts of speech: Change nouns to verbs and vice versa.

Characteristics/Behavior	Your Description