H. Mortimer Batten (1888–1958)

I haven't read this since I was 10 or so, but it absorbed me absolutely. I guess I felt even then that animals are not all that different from us, that they are not just 'running on instinct' but have similar degrees of consciousness--maternal instincts, envy, jealousy, the whole wacky works. Was this the book from which the image remains of the red squirrel eating bits of flesh from a dead mammal? That bit enlightened me about the reality of the forests, whichever book it came from.