As all good herpetologists – be they amateur or professional – likely know, it’s been roughly twenty years since the third edition of “A Field Guide to Reptiles and Amphibians: Eastern and Central North America” was published. And as might be assumed, quite a lot has changed in the field since that time.
What with All Hallows Eve being just a day away, many of us are knee-deep in imagery of things – both real and imaginary – that go bump in the night, presumably with nefarious intentions. Of these a sizable portion are depictions of bats. However rather than being the malicious harbingers of doom they are generally portrayed to be, bats are in fact both fascinating and ecologically essential creatures.
As I stood surveying the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt table at the American Birding Expo in Columbus, Ohio, it suddenly occurred to me that I owned a copy of every book on display – well, every book but one, as I then corrected myself when I noticed a copy of Scott Weidensaul’s just released “Peterson Reference Guide to Owls of North America and the Caribbean.”
Building on the paradigm of a regional general natural history field guide that Kaufman originally originally established in the Kaufman Field Guide to Nature of New England, this second volume in the series takes up the flora and fauna of – as well as the geology, climate, and night sky as seen from – Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio.