The title refers to the physiographic province of the United States that reaches from eastern Utah to eastern California, a silent world of austere beauty, of hundreds of discrete high mountain ranges that are green with junipers and often white with snow. The terrain becomes the setting for a lyrical evocation of the science of geology, with important digressions into the plate-tectonics revolution and the history of the geologic time scale.

    The largest member of the dolphin family was then considered too dangerous to approach in the wild. That all changed when Erich Hoyt and his colleagues spent seven summers in the 1970s following these intelligent, playful creatures in the waters off northern Vancouver Island. Working alongside other researchers keen to understand the life history of the killer whale, Hoyt's group helped to dispel the negative mythology about orcas while uncovering the intimate details of their social behavior.This revised fifth edition includes Hoyt's original account, plus exciting new chapters that bring readers up to date on the revolution in public awareness and orca research that has taken place. Hoyt's youthful adventures turned into his life's work. Now a world-renowned expert on whales and dolphins, he shares orca wisdom along with stories gleaned from decades of additional field study in the Russian Far East as well as return trips to Canada's West Coast to visit with the descendants of the killer whales he encountered 45 years ago.

    Robert's exquisitely-rendered paintings and drawings, accompanied by the artist's recollections and observations, are gathered for art and nature lovers to enjoy.

    Dinosaurs that are swift, stunning, scary and stupendous, presented in a lavish format with over seventy pages of full color illustrations and dozens in black and white. Using the latest paleontological research, The Dinosaurs presents a scientifically accurate and fantastic new look at the way dinosaurs lived: how they moved, ate, dueled, drank and even made love. From ten ton brontosaurs to thirty foot hadrosaurs, here is a story more fantastic that fantasy itself.

    . . . [These] stories expand of their own accord, lingering in the mind the way intense light lingers in the retina."  --Los Angeles Times"Animals and landscapes have not had this weight, this precision, in American fiction since Hemingway's young heroes were fishing the streams of upper Michigan and Spain." --San Francisco ChronicleA flock of great blue herons descending through a snowstorm to the streets of New York. . . . A river in Nebraska disappearing mysteriously. . . . A ghostly herd of buffalo that sings a song of death. . . . A mystic who raises constellations of stones from the desert floor. . . . All these are to be found in Winter Count, the exquisite and rapturous collection by the National Book Award-winning author of Arctic Dreams.In these resonant and unpredictable stories Barry Lopez proves that he is one of the most important and original writers at work in America today. With breathtaking skill and a few deft strokes he produces painfully beautiful scenes. Combining the real with the wondrous, he offers us a pure vision of people alive to the immediacy and spiritual truth of nature."Powerful. . . . [Lopez] can steal your breath away." --Minneapolis Tribune"Richly allusive, moving, compassionate, these stories celebrate the web of nature that holds the world together." --The Philadelphia Inquirer

    Edwin Way Teale's selection of the most compelling of Fabre's writing makes The Insect World of J. Henri Fabre the essential edition of the writer Darwin called "the incomparable observer."

    A heart-warming story of animal psychology, The Zoo That Never Was describes the adventures of the wild menagerie when RD Lawrence and his wife Joan became keepers of orphaned and abandoned animals, including bear, otters, skunk, raccoons, lynx, Canada geese, ducks, turtles, porcupines and more.

    This illustrated handbook contains sections on forest and botanic gardens, forest parks and estates.

    He watched a tribe making stone axes and met a pygmy people who wore extraordinary bulbous hats made from their hair clippings and woven to their scalps. On the island of Pentecost he marvelled at the courage of the sensational land-divers who jumped head first from a tower over eighty feet high with vines tied round their ankles. On Tanna he observed a cargo cult and talked to its leader, and on Tonga he filmed the Royal Kava ceremony, the most important and sacred of all the surviving ancient rituals.David Attenborough describes Madagascar as "one of Nature's lumber rooms, a place where antique outmoded forms of life that have long since disappeared from the rest of the world still survive in isolation". Here he observed many species of lemur, including the enchanting snow-white sifakas and the 'dog-headed man', the indris, about whom there are many legends; he collected fragments of the largest eggs in the world laid by the now extinct Aepyornis, and saw the ritual of the turning the dead.Finally, in the Northern Territory of Australia he filmed the aborigines' way of life, examined the remarkable rock paintings which parallel the first drawings made by mankind, learnt about the legends in which they describe their myths of the creation of the world, and met an old man who lived a hermit's life in a remote part of the outback in an upturned water tank.Vivid descriptions, hilarious incidents, and extraordinary encounters makes this book superb family reading.

    Over 100 maps and photographs. Detailed yet readable by non-scientists.

    While backpacking in an isolated part of the Nevada desert in 1968, Colin Fletcher came upon an old wooden trunk standing at the mouth of a cave. Inside the cave he found what appeared to be a man's possessions, coated with the dust of years. These personal but anonymous effects - among them fragments of a 1916 newspaper - stirred Fletcher's imagination, and a year later he went back and lived in the cave for ten days. The experience inspired in him a determination to piece together the life of the man who had preceded him. After his article describing the discovery and the beginnings of his investigation appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Fletcher heard from Grace Mazeris, an elderly woman who told him she believed that the cave dweller was a prospector named 'Chuckawalla' Bill Simmons - a man she had once lived with. Shortly thereafter, Mrs. Mazeris died and Fletcher, realizing that time was running out, began in earnest to reconstruct Chuckawalla Bill's life. Using records from the National Archives and from Simmons's home town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, Fletcher meticulously and persistently tracked the man's first wanderings as a youth, his service in the Philippine insurrection after the Spanish-American War, and his restless movements - often under an alias - across the western United States. The trail led Fletcher to people who had known Bill Simmons at various times in his life - family members, other men and women who had prospected, played cards, and drunk with him in the desert towns of California. Their encounters are intensely moving as memories of Bill, dormant for decades, are affectionately aroused...." Illustrated with numerous black and white photographs, map endpapers.

    Presents the winning and commended images from the 1997 Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competition, organized by BBC Wildlife Magazine and The Natural History Museum, London.

    Topics covered include: behavioral characteristics (curiosity, raccoons in motion, winter denning); feeding habits, controlling their numbers (disease, parasites and predators); mating, and cubs; and habitat requirements. The book includes a chapter on caring for raccoons, which will be especially helpful for those who - like the author - have been called upon to nurture orphaned raccoon cubs. Raccoons are ecologic opportunists of the first order, living in forest, marsh and coastal environments, and forever exploring new habitats in suburb and city. Many people who have only occasionally glimpsed these predominantly nocturnal creatures will welcome this opportunity to become more familiar with them. Dorcas MacClintock is a mammalogist who is currently a Research Associate at the California Academy of Sciences and a Curatorial Affiliate at Yale Peabody Museum. She is on familiar terms with raccoons, having reared a number of orphaned cubs. J. Sharkey Thomas's sensitive interpretations of wildlife are familiar to animal lovers throughout North America. Two solo exhibitions of her art in New York City have established a widening circle of collectors. "Delightful, painstakingly researched work that introduces the reader to just about every aspect of the structure, habits and life history of the raccoon. Packed with information. While the treatment is thoroughly scientific, the brisk writing style makes for easy, enjoyable reading. Illustrated with many truly exquisite sketches. A fine book." The Conservationist "MacClintock supplies here just about everything you could think to ask about raccoons. Thoroughly informative and smoothly integrated." Kirkus Reviews "A sprightly and detailed study of the appealing animal. The many drawings here are striking." Booklist "Informative and charmingly illustrated." Country Journal

    The birds, fish, and animals that share the cape's fragile ecology on any given summer day with the human residents are described with the fresh eye of a first-rate nature writer.

    

    

    

    

    

    Numerous illustrations and B/W photos.

    Along the Rim is the essential viewpoint-by-viewpoint guide to the South Rim, with seams of history, geology, and natural history winding through the text. Spectacular photographs showcase the scenic grandeur and the historic structures unique to the national park. This all-new edition of the classic book includes the latest information, new viewpoints and road routes, new photographs, and much more.