Coffee Table Book of: North American Wildlife (Paperback)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: North American Wildlife is a large format book of the wild mammals and birds of forest, grassland, mountain, wetland, tundra and coast, printed edge to edge in colour, one picture to a page and the widest carried across two: bears, deer, wild cats, foxes and wolves with their young, whales, seals and sea otters, and birds of the woods, the rivers and the snow, at many hours and in every season.

In the woods a black bear stands on a mossy log, a porcupine rests in the fork of a tree, a raccoon feels among the pebbles of a stream, a bobcat waits among autumn leaves and a wild turkey tom spreads his tail in a wide fan, while a white tailed doe lifts her tail at the edge of a misty wood, a red fox trots past the birches and two black bear cubs wait at a lone pine.

In the mountains a white mountain goat stands on a narrow cliff ledge, a pika carries a bundle of grass and flowers, a hoary marmot sits up on its boulder, a cougar rests on a sunlit ledge and a grizzly digs in an alpine meadow, while bighorn and white wild sheep keep to the high slopes and a bull elk bugles in the frost.

On the tundra caribou walk in single file, muskoxen stand together in the snow, and an arctic fox, a white arctic wolf and a small brown lemming keep to the moss. Along the coast a sea otter floats with a clam and a stone on its chest, a harbour seal lifts its head from calm grey water, a walrus rests on a gravel beach, a humpback whale breaches far off and a polar bear walks the edge of the sea ice, where a mother waits at her snow den with two cubs.

Then deep winter: a red fox diving head first into the snow, a lynx walking on top of it on broad furry paws, a snowshoe hare, an ermine and a willow ptarmigan in white, wolves travelling in single file and howling on a snowy ridge, a black bear asleep in its den and a river otter sliding down a snowy bank.

Short notes run through the book, on how these animals feed, travel and raise their young, how they meet the cold, and the record holders among them: black bear cubs are born in the winter den, each weighing less than half a kilogram, loon chicks often ride on a parent’s back in their first weeks, wolves howl to gather the pack, to raise an alarm and to find one another in a storm, and in snowy country the ermine turns white in winter, all but the black tip of its tail.

Printed in full colour on heavy 150gsm coated paper at 216 x 279 mm (8.5 x 11 inches), as a paperback.