WILLIAM WARNERCHESAPEAKE BAY, and Maryland's eastern shore, are, on the surface, defined by their blue crabs. In summer, picnic tables are covered with newspaper, and the crabs, drenched with hot sauce, are attacked with mallets, eaten and washed down with beer.
In 1976, William Warner's book, Beautiful Swimmers, a detailed study of crabs, crabbing "watermen" and the life of Chesapeake Bay, went beneath the surface, combining history, zoology and the newly popular science of ecology to produce an unlikely bestseller, which won the Pulitzer prize for non-fiction.
It was the first book that Warner, who has died aged 88, had written. He was already 56 years old, and considering retirement from the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington DC, when he said he got "the vague feeling I'd like to do some writing".
Beautiful Swimmerswas reminiscent of Joseph Mitchell's The Bottom of the Harbour, a collection of pieces on the dying life of New York's waterways, written in a similar pellucid style. But it moved deeper than Mitchell's book into the complex ecology of Chesapeake Bay itself.
In the process, Warner helped create an entire genre of books that bring close focus on small and specific slices of nature and history, weaving the two together; the underlying theme being the risk that their subjects will disappear from our world.
Known as "Willy", Warner felt drawn to the eastern shore, and was fascinated by the waters of Chesapeake Bay, and the oddly designed boats that plied the crab trade, Jenkins Creekers or Hooper Island drake tails.
The power of the book lies in its easy familiarity with the watermen, and its author's fascination with the minutiae of their work, an American tradition dating back to Moby Dick. But, like Melville's, Warner's writing grew out of experience.
He spent hours out on the water with the watermen. Last year, in an article in the Washingtonian, one of them recalled that "I enjoyed him really, and he mostly asked sensible questions. A lot says they want to go with you, but come 4am, they're not there. But he was always there, waiting to go."
Warner was born into a wealthy family in New York city, but his parents divorced when he was young. Much of his upbringing fell to his strict maternal step-grandfather, who took him and his brother to the New Jersey shore in summer, where the beaches provided the boys with an escape from domestic discipline.
Warner attended Cornell University, New York state, but after impressing Princeton professor Childs Frick, a family friend, at a dinner party, a transfer to Princeton, in New Jersey, was arranged to study geology. As a summer project in Utah in 1941, he and a friend dug up a dinosaur skeleton, which they presented to Princeton.
He graduated in 1943 and served as an aerial photographic analyst with the US marines. After the war, he taught high school English. In 1951 he married Kathleen McMahon, whom he had met on a weekend train from Manhattan to Quoge, Long Island.
In 1953 Warner joined the US Information Agency in central America. After President Kennedy started the Peace Corps, he spent two years as programme co-ordinator for Latin America, before joining the Smithsonian, where his projects included starting the Smithsonian magazine and organising associates to support the museum.
After the success of Beautiful Swimmers, Warner retired from the Smithsonian and worked on Distant Water: The Fate of North Atlantic Fishermen(1983), for which he learned Russian to talk to the crews of Soviet trawlers. Although the book was, if anything, more compelling than Beautiful Swimmers, it lacked the "star" factor which the crabs had provided in his first book, and it was nowhere near as successful.
An ensuing depression led Warner to his wife's Roman Catholic church, Holy Trinity in Georgetown, Washington, and after his conversion he was asked to write a brief history for its bicentennial, At Peace With All Their Neighbours(1994).
Warner's shorter pieces on the natural world were collected into his final book, Into the Porcupine Cave(1999).
He died from complications of Alzheimer's disease, and is survived by Kathleen and their two sons and four daughters.
Meanwhile, the crab population of Chesapeake Bay has been reduced by pollution to barely a quarter of what it was when Warner wrote his first book.
William Whitesides Warner, writer, born April 2nd 1920; died April 20th 2008