Reviews for Mac's Field Guide to North American Reptiles

The average rating for Mac's Field Guide to North American Reptiles based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-09-09 00:00:00 Arthur Thornley My first bear encounter occurred a year after we'd moved to central Pennsylvania. Picking lettuce in the garden, I looked up to see a full grown black bear standing about twenty five yards away. Oddly enough, I wasn't terrified. My first thought was to get the dog inside before he tried any heroics. I was in the house, reaching for the camera, when I saw the bear run past my front window, then disappear into a wooded area behind the house next door. I might have thought I'd imagined the whole thing but for a neighbor crying, "Did you see it? Did you see it?" Since then I've seen one bear sauntering down the middle of the road late one afternoon, another quietly exiting my backyard through the arbor on a foggy morning, and most amazingly, a big fella making a well-timed dash across a four-lane highway, completely unharmed, leaving astonished grins on the faces of passing motorists. Humans and bears have always had a complex relationship. Our forefathers venerated, killed, caressed, tortured, nurtured, ate, respected, and despised them. Many cultures felt a spiritual kinship with the animals. The bear's ability to stand upright on two legs led many to believe they were somehow related to man. Brunner's book provides an excellent look at these fascinating creatures throughout history. From our ancestor's earliest impressions of the beasts to bears on unicycles, from bears in mythology to the ubiquitous stuffed toys, little is left off the table. There's even a chapter on how bears became popular literary characters. The text is well researched, pleasantly readable and liberally sprinkled with illustrations. It's not that difficult to live alongside bears. As we humans spread out, we encroach more and more upon their territory. Encounters are likely. If you keep your distance and respect their privacy, they will usually do the same for you. When bears start hanging around heavily populated areas, it usually does not end well for the bear. Help discourage their visits by waiting until morning to put trash cans outside. Bring your bird feeders inside at night. "The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them." Margaret Atwood

Review # 2 was written on 2017-08-30 00:00:00 Karl Conrad Ok, let's list all the non-textual reasons I gave this book five stars. 1) In hardcover, the book was a beautifully sized 8 1/4 by 5 inches, which I haven't really encountered in American books, but is an extremely comfortable size (and portable) size. 2) Maybe it was to pad out the relative brevity of the book (236 pages), but it had really big lovely margins on the outside of the text. About an inch, which comes to (by the above dimensions) about 20% of the width of the page. I haven't seen this before, but it made reading the book extremely satisfying. Pages were easy on the eyes, and you had a sense of quick progress, even though it had just reduced the number of words per page. 3) The book is littered with fascinating illustrations, sketches, and early lithographs of bears, many of them tucked neatly into those big margins. The text itself is well written and concise, an amalgam of anecdotes and history that sketch our Brunner's inquiry into how humans have identified with or categorized bears over the course of their existence. Most interestingly, he shows how humans have always identified strongly with bears, especially in Europe and North America, where knowledge of apes was especially scant and bears seemed like our closest relative in the animal kingdom. Some choice bits: On page 25 I learned that the word berserk derives from the Old Norse "berserker", warriors who served Odin and were turn into bears when enraged. ("Beri"=bear, "serkr"=shirt, "berserker"= clothed as a bear.) On page 98, I learned that despite being primarily solitary, bears communicate with one another by rubbing their scent on areas or scratching trees, often to mark a watering hole or a deer crossing. And this mind blowing little tidbit from pages 107-108: ...the Ainu captured cubs and kept them until adulthood... One aspect of the Ainu's dealings with bears however, has tended to disturb folklorists or to be dismissed by them: in Ainu traditional society the women were responsible for raising the bears they captured. Ainu women... cared for the animals with great patience and also frequently nursed them -- a practice that was not at all "secret"... The Ainu are not the only women to have nursed bear cubs. Samuel Hearne... reported that "it is common for the Southern Indians to tame and domesticate the young [bear:] cubs... the Indians oblige their wives who have milk in their breasts to suckle them." Holy. Crap. This is why I read, for little gems like that last passage which blur the lines on how I thought the world worked.