WANDERING THROUGH WINTER <i> by Edwin Way Teale (St. Martin’s Press: $12.95, illustrated) </i>

This Pulitzer Prize-winning volume represents the culmination of Edwin Teale’s tetralogy describing the seasons in North America. During the early ‘60s, Teale and his wife roamed over 20,000 miles, from a beach near San Diego to the northern tip of Maine, observing and taking pictures; the journal of their trip is a sustained, enraptured meditation on the beauties of the land and the animals and plants that inhabit it. Although he has a trained eye for details that might easily be overlooked, Teale writes not as a scientist but as a lover of nature. He summarizes his philosophy in a passage written in southern Colorado: “Picking flowers, collecting butterflies, stuffing birds--all these indicate a love or at least an interest in nature. But on a plane far higher lives one who leaves the flowers blooming and the butterfly and bird flying.”