From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2006:

Return of the Condor: The Race to Save Our Largest Bird from Extinction
by John Moir
Lyons Press (246 Goose Lane, Guilford, CT 06437), 2006.
187 pages, hardcover. $24.95.

Science writer John Moir relates in this book the drama of
the last-ditch captive breeding program that undoubtedly saved the
Californian condor from extinction. Inter-agency politics and
eloquent lobbying by non-interventionists, led by Friends of the
Earth founder David Brower, nearly kept the Condor Recovery Program
from starting.
Brower, who previously headed the Sierra Club and later
founded Earth Island Institute, argued that capturing the last wild
California condors for captive breeding would set a bad precedent for
reducing endangered wildlife to zoo specimens, that reintroduction
would probably fail because captive-bred condors would not learn from

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2006:

Wild Horses: The world’s last surviving herds
by Elwyn Hartley Edwards
Hylas Publishing (129 Main Street, Irvington, NY10533), 2006. 144
pages, hard cover. $24.95.

Well-researched and beautifully presented, with inspiring
photos of exquisite horses, this book presents a wealth of
information about feral horses around the world.
Feral horses persist in places as remote as the Namib desert
in Africa and as seemingly unlikely as the saltwater marshes of the
Camargue region in southern France.
Unfortunately, there are now no longer any true wild horses,
except for Africa zebras and Asiatic wild asses, and their numbers
too have declined because of hunting.
Page after page describes how various wild horse herds were hunted
out of existence.

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, Jine 2006:

Wildlife Demography: Analysis of Sex, Age, & Count Data
by John R. Skalski , Kristen E. Ryding, & Joshua J. Millspaugh
Elsevier Academic Press (30 Corp. Dr., Suite 400, Burlington, MA
01803), 2005. 656 pages, hardcover, $69.95.

As the ANIMAL PEOPLE statistician as well as the editor, I
jumped at the chance to review Wildlife Demography: Analysis of Sex,
Age, & Count Data, for two reasons.
First, at times I feel as if I spend half my life explaining
to people in humane work and animal control the basics of animal
population analysis. Humane workers and animal control officers have
a constant need to estimate and compare populations of street dogs,
pet dogs, feral cats, pet cats, raccoons, deer, nonmigratory vs.
migratory Canada geese, et al.

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2006:

Caribou Rising by Rick Bass
Sierra Club Books (85 Second Street, San , CA 944105), 2004.
164 pages, hard cover. $19.95.

Rick Bass is a hunter. He sees the natural world through the
crosshairs, but considers himself an ethical hunter, as opposed to a
slob hunter, because he measures the success of a hunt by his
“quality of experience,” rather than by the volume of dead meat he
recovers. He thereby considers himself a conservationist, though
the relationship of hunting fraternity notions of fair chase to
protecting biodiversity is at best indirect.
On a hunting trip to Alaska, Bass finds an indigenous native
American community, the Gwich’in, living off a herd of caribou
whose numbers have fallen from nearly 200,000 to about 129,000 in
recent years.

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