Showing 1–12 of 18 results
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Wildlife of Ecuador: A Photographic Field Guide to Birds, Mammals, Reptiles, and Amphibians
Artist/Author: Vásquez Noboa, Andrés (Author), Pablo Cervantes Daza (Illustrator)$66.00 Add to cartMainland Ecuador’s spectacular wildlife makes it a magnet for nature tourists, but until now there hasn’t been a go-to, all-in-one guide geared to the general reader. With this handy and accessible guide, visitors now have everything they need to identify and enjoy the majority of birds and animals they are likely to see. Written and illustrated by two of Ecuador’s most experienced nature guides and photographers, Wildlife of Ecuador covers more than 350 birds, mammals, amphibians, and reptiles. It features over 400 stunning colour photographs and includes a range map for each species, as well as a brief account of the country’s natural history and biogeography. With its extensive coverage, attractive and easy-to-use layout, beautiful photographs, and nontechnical text, this is an essential guide for anyone who wants to explore the natural wonders of Ecuador.
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Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin
Artist/Author: Bleichmar, Daniela$100.00 Add to cartAn unprecedented visual exploration of the intertwined histories of art and science, of the old world and the new.From the voyages of Christopher Columbus to those of Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin, the depiction of the natural world played a central role in shaping how people on both sides of the Atlantic understood and imaged the region we now know as Latin America. Nature provided incentives for exploration, commodities for trade, specimens for scientific investigation, and manifestations of divine forces. It also yielded a rich trove of representations, created both by natives to the region and visitors, which are the subject of this lushly illustrated book. Author Daniela Bleichmar shows that these images were not only works of art but also instruments for the production of knowledge, with scientific, social, and political repercussions. Early depictions of Latin American nature introduced European audiences to native medicines and religious practices. By the 17th century, revelatory accounts of tobacco, chocolate, and cochineal reshaped science, trade, and empire around the globe. In the 18th and 19th centuries, collections and scientific expeditions produced both patriotic and imperial visions of Latin America.
Through an interdisciplinary examination of more than 150 maps, illustrated manuscripts, still lifes, and landscape paintings spanning four hundred years, Visual Voyages establishes Latin America as a critical site for scientific and artistic exploration, affirming that region’s transformation and the transformation of Europe as vitally connected histories. -
Lost Amazon: the pioneering expeditions
Artist/Author: Davis, Wade.$38.00 Add to cartIn 1941, Richard Evan Schultes, often referred to as the father of ethnobotany, took a leave of absence from Harvard University and disappeared into the Colombian Amazon. Twelve years later he resurfaced having travelled to places no outsider had ever visited, mapped uncharted rivers, and lived among two dozen Amazonian tribes. Simultaneously, he conducted secret research missions for the U.S. government and collected some 30,000 botanical specimens, including 2,000 novel medicinal plants and 300 species new to science. The greatest Amazonian botanical explorer of the 20th century, Schultes was a living link to the naturalists of the Victorian era and a world authority on toxic, medicinal, and hallucinogenic plants. Over the course of his time in the Amazonian basin, Schultes took over 10,000 images of plants, landscapes, and the indigenous peoples with whom he lived. Originally published in 2004, “The Lost Amazon” was the first major publication to examine the work of Dr. Schultes as seen through his photographs and field notes. With text by Schultes’s protégé and fellow explorer Wade Davis, this impressive document takes armchair travellers where they have never gone before.
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Nature of the Rainforest: Costa Rica and Beyond
Artist/Author: Forsyth, Adrian, Michael Fogden and Patricia Fogden$69.00 Add to cartNature of the Rainforest is a breathtaking tour of an environment that is the pinnacle of biodiversity and evolutionary sophistication by an award-winning author and two photographers who love the rainforest, understand its intricacies, and have spent considerable time there documenting its wildlife and complexity. Adrian Forsyth draws on four decades of personal encounters with the animals of the rainforest-including poison-dart frogs, three-toed sloths, bushmasters, and umbrellabirds-as a starting point to communicate key ecological topics such as biodiversity, coevolution, rarity, chemical defense, nutrient cycling, and camouflage.
The luminous photographs capture stunning and rare creatures in action, including the now extinct golden toad mating, a jaguar on the prowl, and the hermit hummingbird feeding. The behaviors and characteristics of the rainforest inhabitants featured here not only illustrate the text but also advance the scientific narrative and exemplify the critical importance of conservation. Thematic chapters are interspersed with four chapters devoted to specific habitats and regions of Costa Rica and Peru, areas with some of the most diverse arrays of plant and animal species in the world. The result is an exuberant celebration of the rainforest in text and images.
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A Visitor’s Guide to South Georgia (Second Edition)
Artist/Author: Poncet, Sally and Kim Crosbie.$60.00 Add to cartThis illustrated guide is specifically tailored to the needs of visitors to this remote and captivating part of the world, and it is an ideal book for armchair naturalists. Featuring hundreds of colour photographs of the diverse wildlife and breathtaking scenery to be found at this unique tourist destination. It includes extensive and up-to-date coverage of all wildlife groups – from albatrosses and petrels to seals and penguins – as well as colour maps and detailed information for the 23 key visitor sites. This stunning photographic guide describes the history, geology, and culture of South Georgia. It also provides a checklist of all fauna and flora as well as valuable tips for visitors to the islands, and the book’s wire bound format enables it to fold out flat for easy use in a water-protective holder.
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Field Guide to the Wildlife of South Georgia
Artist/Author: Burton, Robert and John Croxall.$59.00 Add to cartSouth Georgia is rich in wildlife and spectacular scenery, and it is a prime destination spot on most Antarctic tours. This beautifully illustrated field guide depicts the birds, mammals, insects, flowering plants, and other vegetation found in this unique part of the world. It features 368 full-colour photographs of more than 180 species, including 65 species of birds, 20 species of sea mammals, nearly 60 species of insects, and more than 40 species of flowering and nonflowering plants. Detailed species accounts describe key identification features, with information on status, behaviour, threats, and distribution. This one-of-a-kind photographic guide also includes introductory chapters on South Georgia’s geography, climate, ecology, and conservation. This title features 368 photographs of more than 180 species. It covers birds, sea mammals, insects, and plants. It provides detailed species accounts. It includes chapters on geography, climate, ecology, and conservation. This is the only photographic field guide to focus specifically on South Georgia.
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The Wildlife of Costa Rica: A Field Guide
Artist/Author: Reid, Fiona A. et al.$55.00 Add to cartAn indispensable companion for visitors to the beautiful natural areas of Costa Rica. This full-colour field guide features all the mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and arthropods that one is likely to see in Costa Rica’s rainforests, cloud forests, plains and coasts. Providing the best introduction to the country’s amazing diversity of wildlife, this lightweight guide includes details for identifying animals as well as a wealth of natural history information. It is the first general field guide to this deservedly popular neotropical tourist destination.
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An unexpected ecosystem: the Amazon as revealed by fisheries.
Artist/Author: Barthem, Ronaldo and Michael Goulding.$45.00 Add to cartThe Amazon has the richest freshwater fish fauna in the world, and its evolution is closely linked to the rainforest and the vast floating meadows of the floodplains. Fisheries illustrate the urgent need to look at the Amazon rainforest and its rivers as an ecosystem in view of current environmental changes. Proper management of the fisheries requires protecting flooded forests, floating meadows, headwater spawning areas, and other critical habitats. With over 200 color photos and illustrations, this book richly illustrates how the fishes and fisheries are part of the river-and-rainforest ecosystem and what needs to be done for their conservation.
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Pantanal wildlife: a visitor’s guide to Brazil’s great wetland.
Artist/Author: Lowen, James C.$45.00 Add to cartBradt’s fully illustrated wildlife guides focus on regions of the world particularly celebrated for their amazing and often unique species. With spectacular photography or exclusive watercolour drawings throughout, each visitors’ guide provides an introduction to the region’s principal flora and fauna alongside suggested wildlife itineraries, practical information on when to go and what to take and photography tips. Written in a deliberately engaging way, they offer something different from dry field guides, and will appeal to the interested layman as much as the wildlife devotee. Ideal as a lightweight companion to any wildlife trip they also make a handsome souvenir. The Pantanal of Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay is South America’s Serengeti: its wetlands are the largest on earth (they’re half the size of France) and, in the dry season, crocodiles and storks jostle to gobble the last of the dying fish. Here, the continent’s largest cat, the jaguar, lives alongside giant otters, anacondas and the world’s largest parrot. A comprehensive introduction to the best place to watch wildlife in South America, and beautifully illustrated throughout, Bradt’s “Pantanal Wildlife” is the only portable book to cover all the main wildlife groups while focusing exclusively on the Pantanal. Based in Argentina, James Lowen is a wildlife writer, editor, photographer and lecturer. He is editor of the only magazine to focus on birdwatching in Latin America.
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Peruvian wildlife: a visitors guide to the central Andes.
Artist/Author: Walker Barry et al.$45.00 Add to cartA Bradt travel guide. A visitors guide to the high Andes. Some of the hotspots covered are Machu Picchu, Cusco and the Sacred Valley of the Incas, the Inca Trail, the Avenue of the Volcanoes in Ecuador, and Lake Titicaca in Bolivia. With additional sections on geography, geology and a chapter covering the best trekking areas this book is the perfect companion for anyone wishing to come away from their trip with a thorough understanding of the high-altitude ecology of Peru and its neighbours.
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Hispaniola: A Photographic Journey Through Island Biodiversity
Artist/Author: Fernandez, Eladio et al., editors.$115.00 Add to cartFirst, there is a soft rustle in the underbrush, then a low-slung, utterly bizarre-looking insectivore dashes in front of Eladio Fernandez. With a reflexive click of digital shutter, he’s captured the reclusive Solenodon paradoxus – a living fossil. A Dominican-based conservationist and photographer, Fernandez is documenting the efforts of a distinguished team of international scientists as they unravel the workings of evolution being played out on the island of Hispaniola.A short flight from the Florida coast, Hispaniola offers unique opportunities, not just to photographers like Fernandez, but to evolutionary biologists as well. At 40 million years, Hispaniola is far older than the Galapagos. Its considerable age, along with a diversity of habitats – from mountains and cloud forests to savannahs and tropical lowlands – makes this island one of the most spectacular, if poorly understood, troves of biota on the planet. The extraordinary richness of species, much of it endangered and yet to be described, is showcased here in nearly 400 spectacular photographs. The photos are accompanied by essays – in both English and Spanish – that make known the Hispaniolan fungi, plants, and animals by the experts who know them best.Insights gained from Hispaniola’s unique flora and fauna, from its rare orchids to its stunningly beautiful bird life, may enrich our understanding of other, more complex, living systems worldwide. What Fernandez captures here so vividly is not just the amazing variety of living creatures that have erupted in evolutionary isolation, but the urgency of scientists racing to give that variety a name before it vanishes.
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Amazon Expeditions: My Quest for the Ice-Age Equator
Artist/Author: Colinvaux, Paul.$99.00 Add to cartIn this vivid memoir of a life in science, ecologist Paul Colinvaux takes his readers from the Alaskan tundra to steamy Amazon jungles, from the Galapagos Islands (before tourists had arrived) to the high Andes and the Darien Gap in Panama. He recounts an adventurous tale of exploration in the days before GPS and satellite mapping, and a tale no less exhilarating of his battle to disprove a hypothesis endorsed by most of the scientific community. Colinvauxs grand endeavor, begun in the 1960s, was to find fossil evidence of the ice-age climate and vegetation of the entire American equator, from Pacific to Atlantic. The accomplishment of the task by the author and his colleagues involved finding unknown ancient lakes, lugging drilling equipment through uncharted Amazon jungle, operating hand drills from rubber boats in water 40 meters deep, and inventing a pollen analysis for a land with 80,000 species of plants. Colinvauxs years of arduous travel and research ultimately disproved a hotly defended hypothesis explaining bird distribution peculiarities in the Amazon forest. The story of how he arrived at a new understanding of the Amazon is at once an adventurous saga, an account of science as it is conducted in the field, and a cautionary tale about the temptation to treat a favored hypothesis with a reverence that subverts unbiased research.
