Spanning more than twenty years, these essays record changes not only in the natural environment of Cape Cod, but in the writer"s own life.. Death of a Hornet is one man"s elegant rendering of Cape Cod, a sandy, scrub-oaked, tough, and vulnerable spit of land reaching out into the Atlantic Ocean. Here are stories of "natural adventures" that readers of Finch"s previous books have come to expect, as well as longer meditations on the future of the Cape"s fragile environment, the experience of living in one place for a long time and having to leave it, and the limitations of human sympathy.