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Books : Outdoors & Nature : Ecosystems : Deserts
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"Baylor tells us about the desert, describing selected flora and fauna, and respectfully paying tribute to the Desert People who know its secrets and would live nowhere else . . . A striking mood piece."--Booklist. Caldecott Honor Book; ALA Notable Children's Book.
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Imagine crossing a threshold not into someone s home but into another world. Imagine that world to be inhabited by creatures with names as wild as Gila monster, chuckwalla, vinagaroon, boojum and devil s claw. Close your eyes, and smell a world filled with the fragrances of night-blooming cactus flowers, sacred datura, and the aromatic oils of creosotebush released into the air after the first summer rains. Listen hard, and hear the distant calls of Cactus Wrens, cicadas, Scaled Quail, Curve-billed Thrashers and spadefoot toads. Then open your eyes again, and see that the world you ve entered into is swarming with leafcutter ants, carpenter bees, hummingbirds, and kangaroo rats. You have not entered into someone else s home, but one which for a day, a year, or an entire lifetime, may be your own: the Sonoran Desert. It is a homeland that rambles over some 120,000 square miles (320,000 km2) in two countries and five states.
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In this taut, intensely dramatic narrativethe record of a perilous excursion into a remote and unmappable labyrinth of canyons in the American Southwesttwo men confront immutable forces of nature and the limits of their own sanity. As a chronicle of adventure, as emotionally charged human drama, as confessional memoir, THE WAY OUT is a transcendent booka work destined to earn a lasting place in the literature of extremes.
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One of America's most distinguished poets now shares his fascination with a distinctive corner of our country. Richard Shelton first came to southeastern Arizona in the 1950s as a soldier stationed at Fort Huachuca. He soon fell in love with the region and upon his discharge found a job as a schoolteacher in nearby Bisbee. Now a university professor and respected poet living in Tucson, still in love with the Southwestern deserts, Shelton sets off for Bisbee on a not-uncommon day trip. Along the way, he reflects on the history of the area, on the beauty of the landscape, and on his own life. Couched within the narrative of his journey are passages revealing Shelton's deep familiarity with the region's natural and human history. Whether conveying the mystique of tarantulas or describing the mountain-studded topography, he brings a poet's eye to this seemingly desolate country. His observations on human habitation touch on Tombstone, "the town too tough to die," on ghost towns that perhaps weren't as tough, and on Bisbee itself, a once prosperous mining town now an outpost for the arts and a destination for tourists. What he finds there is both a broad view of his past and a glimpse of that city's possible future. Going Back to Bisbee explores a part of America with which many readers may not be familiar. A rich store of information embedded in splendid prose, it shows that there are more than miles on the road to Bisbee.
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Nobody writes about nature and the American landscape the way Craig Childs does. Answering the call of the fiercest of terrains, he opens up to us sites that we would otherwise never visit and, through his uncanny powers of description, makes us feel that we have experienced the very essence of these places. The death-defying and life-affirming journeys that Childs records in SOUL OF NOWHERE make up an exhilarating exploration of his own (and our collective) attraction to remote and forbidding landscapes.
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Techniques for landscapes and gardens that receive fewer than 20 inches of annual rainfall.Inspiring garden scenes in 17 states—from cold and warm deserts, dry grasslands, and Mediterranean climates.
Selection guide details 85 trees, shrubs, and perennials appropriate for dry climates.
Special chapter highlights efficient irrigation systems.
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In the spirit of the avid desert botanist Willis Linn Jepson, The Jepson Desert Manual provides botanical enthusiasts of all backgrounds with the first comprehensive field guide focused exclusively on native and naturalized vascular plants of California's southeastern deserts. Based on The Jepson Manual: Higher Plants of California, the Desert Manual incorporates new illustrations for more than two hundred desert taxa, revised keys to identification, updated distributional information, and 128 color photographs. This guide will allow easier identification of California's fascinating desert plants than would be possible in a manual with broader geographic coverage.
As in The Jepson Manual, detailed descriptions and illustrations of plant characteristics are provided, along with information on native versus alien status, habitats, elevation, endangerment, toxicity, weed status, horticultural requirements, and flowering times. Introductory sections on the desert setting and vegetation offer the reader a broad context and new perspectives for appreciating the more than twenty five hundred plant species included in the Manual. For amateur and professional botanists alike, the Desert Manual will prove to be an invaluable companion in California's spectacular Mojave Desert, Sonoran Desert, and southern Great Basin environments, including the White Mountains.
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Longtime residents of the Sonoran Desert, the Tohono O'odham people have spent centuries living off the land—a land that most modern citizens of southern Arizona consider totally inhospitable. Ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan has lived with the Tohono O'odham, long known as the Papagos, observing the delicate balance between these people and their environment. Bringing O'odham voices to the page at every turn, he writes elegantly of how they husband scant water supplies, grow crops, and utilize wild edible foods. Woven through his account are coyote tales, O'odham children's impressions of the desert, and observations on the political problems that come with living on both sides of an international border. Whether visiting a sacred cave in the Baboquivari Mountains or attending a saguaro wine-drinking ceremony, Nabhan conveys the everyday life and extraordinary perseverance of these desert people in a book that has become a contemporary classic of environmental literature.
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High on the Colorado Plateau lies a uniquely magical desert place: a land of sandy mesas and slickrock escarpments, an elegant maze of vertical-walled, vertigo-inspiring canyons plunging to darkened depths. Cedar Mesa, Utah, is a place frozen in time. A land that can only be adequately explored on foot or horseback, Cedar Mesa offers adventurous visitors magnificent examples of all the topographic and geologic wonders that define "canyon country" throughout the Southwest: stone arches, natural bridges, and breath-sucking precipices, plus hidden springs, hanging gardens, and a treasure of pre-Columbian Indian ruins. Now a writer and a photographer who have roamed the Mesa for more than twenty years—and know many of its well-guarded secrets—offer an intimate look at a place where solitude and silence go hand in hand. Animated by towering "hoodoos"—sandstone formations eroded to resemble all manner of spooky beings—Cedar Mesa is, in David Petersen's words, "an undulating expanse of erosion-sculpted slickrock like petrified ocean swells." He and Branson Reynolds share insights into the natural and human history of the region; they provide a panoramic overview of the Mesa, then take readers on a personally guided descent into the canyons, where hikers can expect to encounter wildlife, prehistoric ruins, stone sculptures, and hidden pools. While providing details regarding much-visited locales, Petersen and Reynolds are more concerned with conveying an overall sense of the area's mystical beauty—capturing the spirit of ancestral Puebloan cliff dwellings but keeping their locations secret so that their magic will not be lost. With its relative lack of roads, campgrounds, and maintained trails, Cedar Mesa is an Eden for personal discovery and hands-on adventure. But "be it known," advises Petersen, "that this is not yet another hand-holding, give-it-all-away, chamber-of-commerce-style 'backcountry' guidebook, of which there are far too many already." He and Reynolds have instead fashioned a book to celebrate and interpret "one of the most palpably spiritual natural places remaining on the American continent"—and to instill in readers the importance of protecting it forever.
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"Spring on the Sonoran Desert can be a four-month-long spectacle of life and color. Within these well-written pages, Alcock exposes us to the plant and animal life of a land many regard as desolate. To Alcock, the desert has a constant evolutionary beauty he never seems to tire of. Alcock's approach to his subject is an elegant combination of science and literature. Only the desert itself, arrayed in its April apparel, can rival the beauty of this book." —Arizona Highways
"Deserts are not as bereft of life as they seem; their barren landscapes can support a remarkable variety of plant and animal life, though it may require a patient and skilled naturalist to reveal its mysteries. John Alcock is just such a naturalist. . . . Alcock provides delightful insights into how insects provision their developing young, how parasites find their victims and how flowers attract pollinators. A book of this kind allows its author, more accustomed to the rigours and constraints of writing academic papers and books, to relate revealing anecdotes and simply to express their fascinating for natural history. . . . Books such as this serve a vital function in bringing the mysteries of the desert to the attention of a wider public." —Times Literary Supplement
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Water is in the air we breathe and beneath the ground we walk on. The very substance of life, it makes up as much as 60 percent of the human body. And yet, for one billion people there is such a thing as life without water. These are the people we meet in Dry--those who live in the dry lands of Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas, eking out an existence at once remarkable and mundane between craggy mountains, near oases, or close to well-springs surrounded by cracked earth or shifting sands.
From the ingenuity of the highland people of Chile's Atacama desert who use giant nets to capture water from clouds of fog, to the ancient wisdom that protects the grazing lands of Kenya's Masai, this beautifully illustrated book tells the diverse stories about people in very hot, very cold, or very high places, who spend their lives collecting, chasing, piping, and trapping the water that life requires--all the while taking great care that no form of life, plant or animal, benefits at the expense of another.
In a world of finite resources, where the struggle for shrinking sources of water intensifies daily, these stories--collected over three years by photographers, writers, and scientists from four continents--are a source of hope and wonder. This book contains a wealth of information and images designed to further awareness of the vast array of life that is carried on precariously yet proudly on the earth's dryest lands.
(20060426)
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Newly revised and updated, this comprehensive field guide describes the four deserts of the American Southwest—the Great Basin, Mojave, Chihuahuan, and Sonoran—which together stretch into nine southwestern states and Mexico. The topography, geology, and climatic conditions of these arid lands set the stage for one of the most fascinating of ecological studies: the survival and adaptation of animal and plant life in the severe, often extreme desert climate and terrain.
Abundantly illustrated with line drawings, maps, charts, and diagrams, The Deserts of the Southwest offers both the outdoor adventurer and the armchair naturalist a clear and detailed portrait of this complex, beautiful, fragile wilderness.
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The Mojave Desert is a winter-rainfall desert, experiencing drought in the summer months and occasional rain during the cooler winter months. For many years it has attracted the attention of ecologists and conservation biologists concerned with maintaining the unique status of this region. This book provides a broad overview of plant and animal ecology in the Mojave Desert, with a focus on data from Rock Valley, Nevada. The data from many major research projects is organized into a synthesis describing community structure and dynamics in desert ecosystems.
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Netting the Sun offers a carefully crafted diversity of natural and human stoies from a landscape seemingly empty and forlorn to passing casual travelers. This surprising interpretation of south central Oregon's botony, geology, wildlife, ethnography, and history reveals what a truly special place the high desert is.Born in the sagebrush community of Lakeview in 1941, the author moved on following high school graduation. But as with many native sons and daughters from America's out-of-the-way places, the urge to return to his roots proved irresistible in middle age.
"I endeavored to write this collection about the Oregon desert because of my childhood there," says Adams, "but also because it is a place of startling mystery, subdued danger, and beauty."
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The frustrations and pleasures of gardening are evident; its implications for life are more subtle, lurking under a leaf or buried in a compost pile. Janice Emily Bowers senses these implications, and communicates them as only a fine writer can. In A Full Life in a Small Place, she shows how backyard gardening opens up a broader appreciation of both life and living. Her observations on organic gardening inspire further meditations on nature and wildlife, and demonstrate how gardens both complicate and enrich our lives. In their entirety, these sixteen essays ask how we shall live, and recognize that "before we can determine how, we need to find out why."
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From mountain shrines to lowland oases, ethnobiologist Gary Nabhan takes us on a series of journeys with contemporary Papago Indians, the Tohono O'odham, or "Desert People." From these journeys we discover how much the Desert People know about the dynamics of their arid homeland in Arizona and Sonora, Mexico. The Desert Smells Like Rain offers insights into the natural history of desert plants and animals as it documents a dying agricultural tradition that has enriched the biological diversity of the Papago's seemingly harsh environment. Drawing on his extensive scientific research and study of Papago folklore, as well as his years of work among the Desert People in village gardening and nutrition programs, Nabhan portrays a desert-adapted way of life that has persisted despite the pressures of modern civilization.