Long before John James Audubon began to chronicle the wildlife of North America in his paintings, Mark Catesby had already undertaken such a project and as a result produced The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands.
This most recent addition to the superb Princeton Pocket Guide series provides information on all the world’s 501 species of shark and should provide hours of both informative reading as well as browsing for both the casual and the serious naturalist alike.
Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, the activities of the U.S. Forest Service were not just the doings of some far off bureaucrats in Washington D.C.; they were the stuff of daily conversation around the restaurants and coffee shops of the hundreds of small towns populated by people who drew their existence from the vast tracts of forests that blanket the region.
Unlike birds, which are generally more difficult to correctly identify than to find, mammals are often quite the opposite. Indeed, given their tendency toward nocturnal activity, sometimes even knowing where to look is a bit of a conundrum.