A dozen field scientists open their notebooks and let you look. George Schaller’s pages from the Serengeti lions and the pandas in Sichuan. Bernd Heinrich on ravens in the Maine woods. Kenn Kaufman’s lists from the year he hitchhiked the country chasing birds at nineteen. Anna Behrensmeyer on reading fossil beds, Jonathan Kingdon on drawing African mammals, Piotr Naskrecki on photographing insects nobody has named. Canfield edited it, E.O. Wilson wrote the foreword, and the real payload is the reproductions: 87 color plates of actual pages, coffee-stained, cross-hatched, scrawled in the rain. Everybody keeps notes differently and everybody defends their system. What comes through is that a pencil and a blank page still beat every device these people carry.