From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2004:

Mammals of North America
by Nora Bowers, Rick Bowers
and Kenn Kaufman
Kaufman Focus Guides (c/o Houghton Mifflin, 215
Park Ave. S., New York, NY 10003), 2004. 352
pages. Flex binding. $22.00.

Reviewers inevitably liken Mammals of
North America editor Kenn Kaufman to the late
Roger Tory Peterson–with reason.
Peterson, editor and chief illustrator
of more than 50 field guides, was introduced to
birding in 1924, at age 11, by a Junior Audubon
Club. The members were taught to shoot birds and
study their corpses. Horrified, Peterson saved
his earnings as a newspaper boy to buy a camera,
at a time when shutter speeds were believed to be
too slow to capture clear images of birds on the
wing, and soon became the first distinguished
bird photographer, hand-tinting his prints
because color film had not yet been invented.
Peterson produced his first Field Guide to the
Birds in 1934.

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2004:

A World of Butterflies
by Brian Cassie, with photos by Kjell Sandved
and extended preface by Robert Michael Pyle
Bulfinch Press (c/o Times Warner Book Group,
1275 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020), 2004.
420 pages, hardcover. $22.50.

A World of Butterflies is an odd hybrid of field guide and
coffee table book, pocket-sized and consisting chiefly of
illustrations, but having the feel of being something to be paged
through indoors, not a quick reference to be packed along on hikes.
It comes with a dust-jacket, sure to be shredded on any field
expedition, and locating any particular butterfly seen on the wing
without already knowing the name of it will be slow going, since the
specimens are not grouped in any manner lending itself to quick
reference.
The girdled silk moth and the giant silk moth appear next to
each other, for example, with some superficial logic, but since
they live on different continents and look nothing alike, there is
little risk of them being confused in observation. What they have
most in common is frequently meeting their demise in boiling water,
the most common method of separating their silken cocoons from the
insect larvae within. Waiting until the larvae have hatched and left
is perfectly possible, but few producers exercise that much
patience, because few buyers insist that they must.

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

True Grizz:
Glimpses of Fernie, Stahr, Easy, Dakota,
and Other Real Bears in the Modern World
by Douglas H. Chadwick
Sierra Club Books (85 2nd St.,
San Francisco, CA 94105), 2003.
176 pages, hardcover. $24.95

Meet the bears: Fernie with her two cubs swim the Hungry
Horse Reservoir looking for food. Stahr opens a door to a screen
porch and, surrounded by 50-pound bags of dog food, naps on the
couch. Dakota hangs out on a street corner in Whitefish, Montana so
often she is named for it.
A few years ago these grizzlies would have been killed. No
questions. No second chances. Douglas Chadwick in True Grizz tells
how Montana is now trying to save the bears with creative and
innovative new methods.
Long gone is the era when grizzlies roamed from Kansas to the
California coast, finding plenty to eat on the way: elk, bison,
mule deer. Males may have weighed close to 1,000 pounds and females
600.
By l975 an estimated 99% percent of the grizzlies in the
Lower 48 had been killed. Standing shoulder to shoulder, the
remaining bears would barely have covered a used car lot. Because
the public demanded that these fabled giants should survive,
grizzlies were among the first species added to the U.S. endangered
list. There were then 750 to 1,000 bears left in the U.S. outside of
Alaska. Today there are 1,000 to 1,300.

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

The Beast in the Garden: A Modern Parable of Man and Nature
by David Baron
W. W. Norton & Company (500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110),
2004. 277 pages, hardcover, $24.95.

This amazing book explains how wild pumas near Boulder,
Colorado came to view humans as prey. The intriguing story,
however, is only the frame that David Baron uses to painstakingly
piece together a gigantic puzzle.
When a puma killed Boulder high school student Scott
Lancaster in 1991, “everyone knew” that healthy pumas did not view
people as prey–but Lancaster’s killer proved to be both wild and
healthy. Baron explains the factors that caused this dramatic change
in puma behavior.
When wild animals came to town in the Old West, they were
shot. If they survived, they learned to avoid people.
Baron relates many sad stories about the wholesale slaughter
of predators in the United States as humans increased in population,
moved out into the wildernesss, and altered the natural landscape.
Baron tells us that author Michael Johnson labeled newcomers
to western cities “New Westers.” “Old Westers believe the West was
won. New Westers are concerned with how it was lost–or will be.”
New Westers passed laws to prevent or limit killing predators.

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