Yesterday, William Burt’s exhibit opened at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, featuring 40 of his  vividly stunning photographs. Running through December 16, 2007, this exhibit traveled from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and will continue on to the Houston Museum of Natural Science, Houston, Texas, upon leaving St. Michaels.

Published in conjunction with the exhibition, Marshes: The Disappearing Edens, offers a larger picture of Burt’s reflections on the marshes he has visited, inviting his readers to come with him and become acquainted with this hidden world, its richness, and its vulnerability.

In this breathtakingly lovely book, Burt explores marshes near and far, from Connecticut to Manitoba, the Gulf of Mexico, California’s Central Valley, the Northern Plains, and elsewhere. His photographs explore all aspects and seasons of marsh life but focus especially on such shy inhabitants as rails, bitterns, grebes, and gallinules. While the photographs tell stories of their own, Burt’s narrative invokes the marshes of the past and compares them to today’s, with prose as picture-sharp as the photography.