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Seventy million years ago in what would become North America, a monstrous thirty-five-foot-long Cretaceous crocodile lurked on a marshy riverbank. Springing suddenly, its huge jaws trapped and crushed a juvenile hadrosaur. Today, the remains of that ancient crocodile are being painstakingly reconstructed in Colorado, where naturalist Zach Fitzner continues his life-long fascination with this amazing animal family. 

In Tears for Crocodilia: Evolution, Ecology, and the Disappearance of One of the World’s Most Ancient Animals, Fitzner tracks the evolution of crocodilians from prehistoric predators to modern endangered wildlife, using his own experiences with these reptiles as a lens to understanding wildlife conservation and our relationship with the natural world. Traveling the world to interact with crocodiles, from observing alligators in a wildlife refuge in Texas and paddling a canoe in the Everglades searching for crocodiles to trekking the jungles in Nepal to find endangered gharials, the author expresses a wonder in exploring these diverse ecosystems, making a connection between crocodilians and the lands they live in. As the story follows crocodilians, it also illuminates their often complicated relationship with humans, from crocodile cults in ancient Egypt to American alligators living on golf courses. Fitzner also closely examines the dark side of this relationship, including habitat destruction and poaching as well as the mechanistic view of traditional conservation that turns these magnificent animals into agricultural products. Tears for Crocodilia delves deeply into issues of wildlife conservation, ethics, and how we can coexist with other creatures. It is also a tribute to a magnificent group of animals, survivors from the age of dinosaurs. 

With a wide variety of habitats ranging from southeastern swamps to western deserts, Texas is home to numerous species of frogs, toads, and salamanders. Each area of Texas has a particular set of species that has evolved there over thousands of years. Indeed, most amphibians are not very mobile, and many live their entire lives within a few square meters. This makes them particularly vulnerable to environmental degradation and habitat destruction.

Texas Amphibians is the only field guide focused exclusively on the state’s frogs, toads, and salamanders. It presents brief, general accounts of the two orders and fifteen families. Then it identifies each of the seventy-two species in detail, including size, description, voice (if applicable), similar species, distribution (with maps), natural history, reproduction, subspecies (if applicable), and comments and conservation information. Color photographs illustrate the species.

The book also includes a general introduction to amphibian natural history, conservation, observation and collection, maintenance in captivity, museum and preserved specimens, and scientific and common names, as well as scientific keys to Texas salamanders and frogs and a generic key to amphibian larvae. This wealth of information, compiled by a team of experts who collectively have over a century of experience in field herpetology, will increase our appreciation for amphibians and the vital role they play as an early indicator of threats to the quality of the environment that we all share.

Northern bobwhites are one of the most popular game birds in the United States. In Texas alone, nearly 100,000 hunters take to the field each fall and winter to pursue wild bobwhite quail. Texas is arguably the last remaining state with sufficient habitat to provide quail-hunting opportunities on a grand scale, and Texas ranchers with good bobwhite habitat often generate a greater proportion of their income from fees paid by quail hunters than from livestock production. Managing and expanding bobwhite habitat makes good sense economically, and it benefits the environment as well. The rangelands and woodlands of Texas that produce quail also support scores of other species of wildlife.

Texas Bobwhites is a field guide to the seeds commonly eaten by northern bobwhites, as well as a handbook for conserving and improving northern bobwhite habitat. It provides identifying characteristics for the seeds of 91 species of grasses, forbs, woody plants, and succulents. Each seed description includes a close-up and a scale photo of the seed and the plant that produces it, along with a range map. Using this information, hunters can readily identify concentrations of plants that are most likely to attract quail. Landowners and rangeland managers will greatly benefit from the book's state-of-the-art guidance for habitat management and restoration, including improving habitat dominated by invasive and nonnative grasses.

When nature goes haywire in Texas, it isn't usually an earthshaking event. Though droughts, floods, tornadoes, and hail all keep Texans talking about the unpredictable weather, when it comes to earthquakes, most of us think we're on terra firma in this state. But we're wrong! Nearly every year, earthquakes large enough to be felt by the public occur somewhere in Texas.

This entertaining, yet authoritative book covers "all you really need to know" about earthquakes in general and in Texas specifically. The authors explain how earthquakes are caused by natural forces or human activities, how they're measured, how they can be predicted, and how citizens and governments should prepare for them. They also thoroughly discuss earthquakes in Texas, looking at the occurrences and assessing the risks region by region and comparing the amount of seismic activity in Texas to other parts of the country and the world. The book concludes with a compendium of over one hundred recorded earthquakes in Texas from 1811 to 2000 that briefly describes the location, timing, and effects of each event.

From the dense forests of the Big Thicket to the limitless vistas of the Davis Mountains, Texas is a land of astonishing diversity and natural beauty. Yet it is also a land where commuters endure endless traffic jams in the major cities and where pollution and environmental degradation threaten the most essential elements of our common living space—the land, air, and water.

In this thoughtful, practical book, Pete Gunter and Max Oelschlaeger offer a new vision for living on the land, a 'land ethic' that respects the stability, integrity, and beauty of the "land community." Avoiding harsh rhetoric that seeks only to place blame and foretell doom, they discuss how economic and environmental goals may be reconciled so that Texans can continue to enjoy a reasonable prosperity while living in a land free of pollutants and scars, where some wild lands still exist and animals range freely.

In presenting their land ethic, the authors draw on the ideas of Aldo Leopold, whose A Sand County Almanac persuasively urges human beings to respect the land—with all of its animal and plant inhabitants—that supports us. This is an ethic to take Texas into the twenty-first century, in which the wise choices we make now will create a stable and sustainable future.

“Texas offers the opportunity to observe lizard diversity like no other part of the country,” writes Laurie J. Vitt in the foreword to Texas Lizards. From the moist eastern Piney Woods to the western deserts, lizards can be found in every part of Texas. The state has forty-five native and six naturalized species of lizards, almost half of the 115 species that live in the continental United States. Yet Texas lizards have not received full coverage in regional field guides, and no other guide dedicated solely to the state’s lizards has ever been published.

Texas Lizards is a complete identification guide to all fifty-one native and established exotic lizard species. It offers detailed species accounts, range maps, and excellent color photographs (including regional, gender, and age variations for many species) to aid field identification. The authors, two of the state’s most knowledgeable herpetologists, open the book with a broad overview of lizard natural history, conservation biology, observation, and captive maintenance before providing a key to Texas lizards and accounts of the various lizard families and species. Appendices list species of questionable occurrence in Texas and nonestablished exotic species. Informational resources on Texas lizards, a map of Texas counties, a glossary, a bibliography, and indexes of common and scientific names round out the volume.

Hundreds of species of mushrooms flourish in Texas, from the desert and semiarid regions of West Texas to the moist and acid soils of East Texas, where species that can also be found in South America live alongside those that might be spotted in Malaysia and Europe. Texas Mushrooms was the first—and is still the only—guide to all of the state’s mushrooms.

This colorful, easy-to-follow book will surprise and delight uninitiated nature enthusiasts while also supplying the experienced mushroom hunter with expert identification information. Excellent color photographs and precise descriptions of over 200 species will enable the mushroom hunter—even the amateur—to make quick, careful, easy distinctions between the edible varieties and the potentially toxic ones. In addition, kitchen-tested recipes are included, along with charts giving spore sizes and a list of recommended further reading.

In Texas, mushroom hunting can be a year-round, state-wide activity, and with this enticing field guide, collecting, identifying, and preparing wild mushrooms will become an activity the entire family can enjoy while appreciating the beauty of Texas from a new and fascinating angle.

Texas has a large and diverse turtle population, with forms that are found nowhere else (Cagle’s Map Turtle and the Texas Map Turtle) and wide-ranging species that barely touch the state, including the Painted Turtles and the Rough-footed Mud Turtle. From the Sabine River to El Paso, and from the Rio Grande to the Panhandle, thirty-one native and established exotic turtle species are definitely known in Texas, along with one crocodilian, the American Alligator.

Texas Turtles & Crocodilians is the first complete identification guide to all the state’s turtles and to its single alligator. It offers detailed species accounts, range maps, and excellent color photographs to aid in field identification. The authors, two of the state’s most knowledgeable herpetologists, open the book with a broad overview of turtle natural history, conservation biology, observation, and captive maintenance before providing a key to Texas turtles and accounts of the various turtle families and species. Appendices provide brief accounts of species that occurred prehistorically in Texas and non-established exotic species, as well as a table of Texas’ major watersheds and the turtle diversity in each one. Informational resources on Texas turtles and alligators, a map of Texas counties, a glossary, a bibliography, and indexes of common and scientific names complete the volume.

With more than 175,000 copies sold, Texas Wildflowers has established itself as the go-to guide for identifying the state’s roadside flowers. This new edition has been completely reorganized by flower colors (and within each color section, by flowering season) to make it even easier to identify the flowers you see as you travel through Texas. Every wildflower is illustrated with a beautiful full-color photograph—over 250 of which are new to this edition. All of the descriptive identifying information is presented in a consistent format—common and botanical names, plant and leaves, flowers and fruit, flowering season, habitat and range, and notes.

What hasn’t changed is the book’s sturdy binding, which will hold up through years of active use, and its wealth of information, which has been thoroughly updated by the expert staff of the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center:

• 300 species descriptions, including engaging comments about the plants’ natural histories, landscape uses, edible or medicinal properties, and folklore
• A map of Texas’s vegetational areas
• Glossaries that define and illustrate botanical terms
• A bibliography of books for learning more about wildflowers
• Indexes to common and botanical plant names, as well as plant families, that distinguish between native and non-native species

As Lady Bird Johnson observed in the foreword, Texas Wildflowers “makes me want to reach for my sunhat, put on my walking shoes, take this knowledge-filled book, and fare forth to seek and discover!”

Natural habitats for wildlife in Texas and the many species they support are dwindling at an alarming rate as an ever-growing population continues to develop the land for commercial, industrial, and agricultural uses. To take stock of our current wildlife and land resources, identify challenges facing them, and offer strategies for future management and conservation, this book presents over twenty-five essays by experts from a wide range of governmental and private organizations involved in wildlife policy and management.

Modeled on the proceedings of a 1982 wildlife symposium published by the Texas Chapter of The Wildlife Society, this book updates and expands the issues involved in wildlife and land use. The chapters are grouped into five sections-perspectives on Texas wildlife resources, future expectations in land use, the public and future demands for wildlife, wildlife management and research, and wildlife management on public lands. The diverse and sometimes competing viewpoints presented here will be important reading for everyone concerned with managing land for wildlife.

A work of natural and environmental history.

That Which Roots Us is a work of natural and environmental history that explores the origins of and resolutions to some of the United States’ environmental problems. Marion Dresner discusses the roots of Euro-American environmental exploitative action, starting with the environmental consequences of having treated Pacific Northwest forests as commodities. She shares her experiences visiting sites where animal-centered ice age culture changed to human-centered culture thousands of years ago with the advent of farming. The book explores the origins of the romantic philosophical movement, which arose out of the debilitating conditions of the industrial era. Those romantic attitudes toward nature inspired the twentieth-century preservation movement and America’s progressively modern conservation attitudes. 

The book is centered around environmental issues in the Pacific Northwest, contrasting utilitarian views of nature with Native American practices of respect and reciprocity. The elements that make That Which Roots Us a truly unique and important contribution to environmental literature are the author’s personal recollections and interactions with the landscape. Ultimately, Dresner offers hope for a new stewardship of the land and a focus on science literacy and direct experience in the natural world as the most grounded way of knowing the planet.

In an era of accelerating extinctions, what does it mean to discover thousands of new species in the deep sea?

As we see the catastrophic effects of the Anthropocene proliferate, advanced technologies also grant us greater access to the furthest reaches of the world’s oceans, facilitating the discovery of countless new species. Sorting through the implications of this strange paradox, Stacy Alaimo explores the influence this newfound intimacy with the deep sea might have on our broader relationship to the nonhuman world. While many images of these abyssal creatures circulate as shallow clickbait, aesthetic representations can be enticing lures for speculating about their lives, profoundly expanding our environmental concern.

The Abyss Stares Back analyzes a diverse range of scientific, literary, and artistic accounts of deep-sea exploration, including work from the naturalist William Beebe and the artist Else Bostelmann as well as results of the Census of Marine Life that began at the turn of the twenty-first century. As she focuses on oft-overlooked creatures of the deep, such as tubeworms, hatchetfish, siphonophores, and cephalopods, which are typically cast as “alien,” Alaimo shows how depictions of the deep seas have been enmeshed in long colonial histories and racist constructions of a threatening abyss.

Drawing on feminist environmentalism, posthumanism, science and technology studies, and Indigenous and non-Western perspectives, Alaimo details how our understanding of science is fundamentally altered by aesthetic encounters with these otherworldly life forms. She argues that, although the deep sea is often thought of as a lifeless void with little connection to human existence, our increasing devastation of this realm underscores our ethical obligation to protect the biodiverse life in the depths. When the abyss stares back, it demands recognition.

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Breeding on remote ocean islands and spending much of its life foraging for food across vast stretches of seemingly empty seas, the albatross remains a legend for most people. And yet, humans are threatening the albatross family to such an extent that it is currently the most threatened bird group in the world. In this extensively researched, highly readable book, Robin W. Doughty and Virginia Carmichael tell the story of a potentially catastrophic extinction that has been interrupted by an unlikely alliance of governments, conservation groups, and fishermen.

Doughty and Carmichael authoritatively establish that the albatross's fate is linked to the fate of two of the highest-value table fish, Bluefin Tuna and Patagonian Toothfish, which are threatened by unregulated commercial harvesting. The authors tell us that commercial fishing techniques are annually killing tens of thousands of albatrosses. And the authors explain how the breeding biology of albatrosses makes them unable to replenish their numbers at the rate they are being depleted. Doughty and Carmichael set the albatross's fate in the larger context of threats facing the ocean commons, ranging from industrial overfishing to our habit of dumping chemicals, solid waste, and plastic trash into the open seas. They also highlight the efforts of dedicated individuals, environmental groups, fishery management bodies, and governments who are working for seabird and fish conservation and demonstrate that these efforts can lead to sustainable solutions for the iconic seabirds and the entire ocean ecosystem.

Perhaps no creature has so fired the imagination of a populace as the armadillo—that most ungainly, awkward, and timid little animal. Its detractors call it a varmint and wish it good speed from the Lone Star State and its other natural territories. But its supporters claim that it is the animal kingdom's representative of all that's truly Texan: tough, pioneering, adaptable, and generous in sharing its habitation with others. What is it that sets this quizzical little creature apart from the rest of the animal kingdom?

Larry L. Smith and Robin W. Doughty ably answer this question in The Amazing Armadillo: Geography of a Folk Critter. This informative book traces the spread of the nine-banded armadillo from its first notice in South Texas late in the 1840s to its current range east to Florida and north to Missouri. The authors look at the armadillo's natural history and habitat as well as the role of humans in promoting its spread, projecting that the animal is increasing in both range and number, continuing its ecological success in areas where habitat and climate are favorable.

The book also contributes to a long-standing research theme in geography—the relationship between humans and wildlife. It explores the armadillo's value to the medical community in current research in Hansen's Disease (leprosy) as well as commercial uses, and abuses, of the armadillo in recent times. Of particular note is the author's engaging look at the armadillo as a symbol of popular culture, the efforts now underway to make it a "totem animal" symbolizing the easy-going lifestyles of some Sunbelt cities, and the spread of the craze for armadilliana to other urban centers.

Whether we live in cities, in the suburbs, or in the country, birds are ubiquitous features of daily life, so much so that we often take them for granted. But even the casual observer is aware that birds don’t fill our skies in the number they once did. That awareness has spawned conservation action that has led to notable successes, including the recovery of some of the nation’s most emblematic species, such as the Bald Eagle, Brown Pelican, Whooping Crane, and Peregrine Falcon. Despite this, a third of all American bird species are in trouble—in many cases, they’re in imminent danger of extinction. The most authoritative account ever published of the threats these species face, The American Bird Conservancy Guide to Bird Conservation will be the definitive book on the subject.

The Guide presents for the first time anywhere a classification system and threat analysis for bird habitats in the United States, the most thorough and scientifically credible assessment of threats to birds published to date, as well as a new list of birds of conservation concern. Filled with beautiful color illustrations and original range maps, the Guide is a timely, important, and inspiring reference for birders and anyone else interested in conserving North America’s avian fauna. But this book is far more than another shout of crisis. The Guide also lays out a concrete and achievable plan of long-term action to safeguard our country’s rich bird life. Ultimately, it is an argument for hope. Whether you spend your early weekend mornings crouched in silence with binoculars in hand, hoping to check another species off your list, or you’ve never given much thought to bird conservation, you’ll appreciate the visual power and intellectual scope of these pages.

The American Robin is North America's most widespread songbird, with a range extending from Alaska, Canada, and Newfoundland to the highlands of Mexico and Guatemala. Its ruddy red breast and cheerful song have also made it one of our most beloved birds—as American as apple pie, as familiar a harbinger of spring as the first daffodil. Connecticut, Michigan, and Wisconsin have chosen the American Robin as their state bird, while a pair of robins grace the Canadian two dollar bill.

In this book, Roland Wauer offers a complete natural history of the American Robin for a popular audience. Combining his own observations as a field naturalist with data gleaned from the scientific literature, he describes the American Robin from every angle—appearance and biology, distribution, behavior, life cycle, and enemies and threats. In addition, he explores the legends and lore surrounding robins and offers suggestions for attracting them to your yard.

The rich diversity of Arkansas’s amphibian and reptilian species comes alive in this thoroughly updated second edition of The Amphibians and Reptiles of Arkansas. An indispensable resource for both professionals and enthusiasts, and praised for its accessible language and scientific rigor, this field guide not only reflects the latest in taxonomic research but also celebrates the surge in herpetological studies in Arkansas over the past two decades, showcasing a thriving academic interest while addressing gaps in the first edition.

Building on the foundation of the acclaimed first edition, this updated work introduces enhanced color maps, updated range data, and an array of new illustrations, capturing a more vivid and comprehensive picture of Arkansas’s herpetofauna. Meticulously illustrated identification keys, species accounts, and pictorial guides make this a valuable tool for identifying species in the field, in classrooms, or in one’s own backyard.