Hal Borland: “Here’s another of those crackpot editorials about the voices of frogs…”

From The Writer’s Almanac:

It’s the birthday of nature writer Hal Borland, born in Sterling, Nebraska in 1900. His father was a newspaperman. Hal started out at his father’s paper in Flagler, Colorado, a town of 750 people, and he ended up at The New York Times in 1937.

One day, he submitted a piece about the English oak tree to the editorial page, and it was accepted. After that, his nature editorials were a staple in the Times. He published one every week, and by the time he died in 1978 he had written 1,750 nature editorials — the last of them published the day before his death.

Borland kept a New Yorker cartoon on his office wall showing a man brandishing a newspaper and shouting: “Here’s another of those crackpot editorials about the voices of frogs shattering the autumn stillness!”