As a lifelong resident of Nova Scotia, Harry Thurston has never lived more than 50 miles from the sea. He spent his childhood exploring the largest salt marshes in Atlantic Canada, along the tidal Chebogue River, and later moved with his family to the nearby historic seaport of Yarmouth whose harbour launched ships to all corners of the world in the 19th century. Today it is the centre of the richest lobster fishery in Atlantic Canada. He studied biology at Acadia University, overlooking the world’s highest tides in the Bay of Fundy.

As a fisheries research technician in the late 1960s he was witness to the decimation of herring stocks on Georges Bank, which set his course on a career as an environmental writer for such magazines as Audubon, Canadian Geographic, National Geographic, and Equinox.

Thurston has travelled extensively throughout the northeast, from northern Labrador to Delaware Bay, writing about the natural wonders of the region and the threats posed to them.

A poet as well as a journalist, he has published more than twenty books on subjects as diverse as dinosaurs to shorebirds. The award-winning Tidal Life: A Natural History of the Bay of Fundy, has been called a “natural history classic” by Maine’s Island magazine and is still in print 20 years after its original publication. A Place between the Tides: A Naturalist’s Reflections on the Salt Marsh, was a finalist for the Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize and the British Columbia Award for Canadian Non-Fiction and winner of the 2004 Sigurd Olsen Nature Writing Award in the United States.

Currently, Thurston lives on the banks of the tidal Tidnish River which flows into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where he keeps watch on the migrant and resident wildlife of “this place of abundance.”