Watching Desert Wildlife (Watching Wildlife With Jim Arnosky) - Hardcover

Jim Arnosky is the ward-winning author and illustrator of more than 50 books for children. Each reflects his love of animals and the environments in which they live. Arnosky’s talent for sharing his sense of wonder with children has earned him the Washington Post-Children’s Book Guild Award for his overall contribution to nonfiction for children and the Eva L. Gordon Award for outstanding children’s science literature. He lives in South Ryegate, Vermont, with his wife Deanna. You can visit him on the Web at www.jimarnosky.com.

Arnosky (Crinkleroot's Visit to Crinkle Cove, p. 892, etc.) departs from his usual wildlife settings with a trip to the Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts of the American Southwest. The artist turns an eye, and a camera, on the desert's animals, always on the lookout for a lizard darting beneath rocks or an elf owl tucked in a hole of the giant saguaro, set against a landscape of rocks and grasses. Rock squirrel and roadrunner, coral snake and turkey vultureeach provide an opportunity for sketching wildlife in its habitat. Tips for observing desert wildlife are interspersed among the comments themselves, rounded out with habits and characteristics of every creature. Writing in a conversational style, Arnosky catalogs his trip from the car window, along the dusty trail, or standing on a field, always making the factual information personal. In a volume resembling Virginia Wright-Frierson's A Desert Scrapbook (1996), many of the detailed drawings are not only lifelike, but life-size, shown from a distance or up close, as it would appear through a telephoto lens. Glorious colors--the emerald green of a Sonoran whipsnake, the pink stain of a pronghorn's waterholelift the desert landscape and its creatures out of the dust and into the light. (Picture book/nonfiction. 7-12) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.