Writer finds she's a natural in the wilderness

This graphic of a deer is featured on the cover of Zhou Wei's book How to See Deer.

But not every encounter is happy.

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On a foggy night on Whidbey Island in Washington State in 2004, Zhou and her friends were driving and chatting through a densely wooded area. Suddenly, a frightened deer jumped on the road and was hit by the car.

"That's when I learned the word roadkill in sorrow."

Zhou was in a faculty exchange program and taught Chinese at Skagit Valley College in Mount Vernon, Washington State. It was during that year that she started writing about nature.

She set up her first blog to record her experiences during her yearlong stay in the US, including her encounters with nature. She wrote about learning the name of new trees and flowers, spotting a trumpeter swan, and observing a cottontail rabbit in her backyard.

"Almost every day there were some exciting encounters with nature," Zhou recalls.

Zhou kept updating her new discoveries in nature after she returned to Beijing and taught at Beijing Foreign Studies University.

In Zhou's works, one will find traces of the tradition of North America nature writing: She admires Aldo Leopold's simplicity and subtleness in A Sand County Almanac and Henry David Thoreau's classic Walden has had a very strong influence on her.