He might be best known for the Emmy-winning Wisconsin Public Television documentary, “A Farm Winter with Jerry Apps,” but Apps is also a veteran nature and environmental writer with several books and many articles.
His latest publication, Whispers and Shadows: A Naturalist’s Memoir (published by Wisconsin Historical Society Press), is the basis for his next documentary, “The Land with Jerry Apps,” scheduled to air in November on Wisconsin Public Television. As he explains in the introduction, his theme concerns those things in nature not easily observed—not the bald eagle in flight or the towering oak—but “the tiniest wildflower, the subtle sound of snowflakes alighting on pine needles.”
Apps is well suited to the task. He is a writer with a clear sense for his surroundings, gifted with a spare but descriptive prose style. He credits much of this to growing up on a farm, but few farmers’ children ever develop such evocative powers to summarize the natural world.
