Authors pen the ultimate cottage and camping companion

Authors pen the ultimate cottage and camping companion. Veteran birders, canoers and campers, Doug Bennet, left, of Parkdale and Tim Tiner of Riverdale recently released The Complete Up North: A Guide to Ontario's Wilderness from Black Flies to the Northern Lights. Staff photo/ERIN HATFIELD

Veteran birders, canoers, and campers, Doug Bennet of Parkdale and Tim Tiner of Riverdale, wrote their first guide book, the bestselling Up North, in 1993.

Tiner explained he and Bennet, who are both journalists, were on a canoe trip in the summer of 1989 in Algonquin Park when the conception of the first book took place.

They had reams of guidebooks on different topics and park literature and while flipping back and forth between each they decided it would be useful to have just one book that combined the most useful aspects of each.

Finding there was no such book, the men decided they would write it.

"We put together a book proposal and it was about a four-year process from the time of the idea to when it came out," Tiner said. "It was perfect because there really wasn't any book like it and it did really well."

That first book sold more than 50,000 copies and this latest book is the pair's fifth in the series, which includes an urban nature guide and an American version.

The appeal, the men say, is that The Complete Up North isn't your average nature guide. It's filled with amusing trivia, easy-to-understand natural history, and little-known folklore. Each species account is like a mini essay, written less like a guide and more like a trivia book of fun facts and antidotes about nature in Ontario.

"It's a good alpha-male book fathers like to have and say, 'did you know a mosquito can blah-blah-blah,'" Tiner said. "It is an easy book to just dip into and get the information that you want quickly."

The new book is crammed with literally hundreds of new facts on the sidebars.

"It is amazing how much has changed in 20 years of nature in this province: ranges change, numbers of animals and species change and tonnes of new research information," Tiner said.

Bennet said the book also tells stories, which isn't a common guidebook feature.

"A lot of nature guides are very dry and just give you the basic information about identifying a species and maybe give you the Latin name, but it doesn't go any further," Bennet said. "Where we might look at the Latin name and explain where it came from and the interesting story behind it."

For example, a story featured in the first book that got a lot of traction, Bennet said, was a story that connected the building of the subway in Toronto with white deer populations in Algonquin Park.

"It had to do with several things, but the main thing was that hemlock trees were harvested in Algonquin as shoring timbers for the tunnels for the subway." Bennet explained. "Hemlock trees happen to create deer habitat in the park, so when deer habitat was removed to create the subway tunnels the deer population went down."

It took endless hours of research to source out all of the information, especially considering there was no Internet at the time the first book was written.

Bennet said the men did a great deal of library research, talked to a lot of experts, read reams of material and canoed into isolated native reserves to view original manuscripts by early surveyors.

Today, much of the information contained in the book could be found on the online, but that doesn't take away from their product, Bennet said.

"This is the kind of book people have at their cottage or bring with them on a camping trip; it is kind of used mostly in areas where I don't think people are connected to the Internet or want to be connected to the Internet," Bennet said. "It is in outhouses up north, it is in the cottage library, it is used as a gift... it works really well as a book."

The book was official released on April 29. Visit http://upnorthguides.com for more information.