Of Golden Toads and Serpents' Roads: 34 (Louise Lindsey Merrick Natural Environment Series) - Tapa dura

This volume invites readers to Join a seasoned researcher as he ""goes herping."" After nearly twenty years of traveling around the globe searching for toads, frogs, salamanders, snakes, lizards, and turtles, herpetologist Paul Freed pauses to tell storles of his adventures finding and collecting reptiles and amphibians from the tropics of Costa Rica to the deserts of Namibia. Whether confronting scorpions, beefworms, army ants, or venomous snakes. Freed conveys a contagious enthusiasm for the outdoors and all that lives in it. With humor and gratitude, he embraces both the hardships and the rewards of being in the field. His tales of discovery are also travel stories, and by sharing the experiences of his trips across the globe - ""the successful ones and those not so successful"" - Freed encourages the adventurer in all of us. As he ponders on a writhing knot of golden toads - a species that may now be extinct - or the twitching blue tall broken from a girdled lizard. Freed introduces conservation issues particular to specific locales and those shared across the global village. Through his experiences, readers learn a variety of exotic wildlife collection techniques, some of which represent lngenious improvising under hazardous conditions and some of which are downright humorous. Readers share the excitement of scientific discoveries, the thrill of international travel to remote and fascinating regions, and the opportunity to encounter both rare and abundant wildlife in its natural habitats. Armchair naturalists, arnateur herpers, and people interested in exotic travel, ecotourism, and scientific adventure will find this book just as appealing and informative as will professional and academic herpetologists.

Paul Freed is supervisor of the Herpetology Section at the Houston Zoo in Houston, Texas, and a field associate at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. He is the author or coauthor of more than sixty articles in scientific and popular journals, and his photographs are widely published in a variety of books, textbooks, calendars, and magazines including National Geographic Explorer.