Stranger in the Woods

The picture book Stranger in the Woods: A Photographic Fantasy, intended for young children, was published in 1999 by Carl R. Sams and Jean Stoick. Sams and Stoick are professional wildlife photographers whose work has been featured in publications such as National Geographic.

For this book, they used some of the more than 60,000 images that they took during the blizzard of 1999 of a family of whitetail deer living near their Milford, Michigan, farm to create a storybook that uses extraordinary photography instead of drawings as illustrations.

Dedicated to “those who protect wild places and to the snowman that lives in every child's heart,” Stranger in the Woods has proven extremely popular, winning several awards. Sams and Stoick donate the proceeds from its sales to support the Nature Conservancy and the Rainbow Connection, an organization that makes wishes come true for children with life-threatening diseases.



The story is a simple one. In the morning after a big snowstorm, animals deep in the forest notice that something strange has entered their woods. The birds are the first to send out a warning, calling out, "There's a stranger in the woods! There's a stranger in the woods!"

At first, none of the animals are brave enough to venture out toward the stranger. As the owl, the deer, the rabbit, the chickadee, the cardinal, and the mouse wonder whether they have what it takes to confront the newcomer, Stranger in the Woods shows each of the animals in its natural habitat, nestled in their dens and nests.

Finally, the debate ends as a young whitetail buck volunteers to see what is going on. However, when he pauses to consider the confusing stranger, the courageous chickadee actually gets close enough to make contact with the odd-looking, white snowy person. Photographs show a deer eyeing the snowman's carrot nose, and the chickadee perching on the snowman's carrot nose – the two photographs that inspired Sams and Stoick’s concept of the story.



As the chickadee discovers, the snowman is covered in treats for all the forest animals. There are seeds and nuts in his hat for the chickadee and the mouse, corn by his feet for the rabbits and cardinal, and even a carrot nose for the fawn.

After the animals feast from the snowman’s offerings, the book reveals the real “strangers in the woods” – a pair of children who have created the snowman, laden it with food, and who now come out to restock all the treats that have been eaten.

The book ends with a "Recipe for a Snowman" that invites its young readers to recreate what the children in the book have done for the wild animals in their own lives.