Aldabra alone;

by Tony Beamish

Book Overview

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0045910138
• ISBN13: 9780045910137
• Release Date: January 1970
• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Length: 222 Pages
• Weight: 1.65 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Contents:

This is the first book to be written about a living natural history museum tucked away in a last corner of the Indian Ocean. For men it is an achievement just to stay alive on Aldabra, but for the tortoises and birds it is a paradise. It is one of the few tropical island that remain unspoiled, and was recently the object of the biggest conservation battle of all time.Tony Beamish tells of a remarkable journey around the island's seventy-mile rim of honeycombed coral, so sharp and spiky that it cut his climbing boats to ribbons. He describes the unique animals and birds that dwell on the sailless and waterless atoll, such as the 80,000 giant tortoises, a population far outnumbering the 3,000 that survive in their only other refuge on the Galapagos Islands; the frigate bird with its seven-foot wingspan; and some of the rarest land birds of the world including the last flightless bird in this region once famous for the dodo.He also tells of the campaign to save Aldabra, from the threatened construction of an airfield there; of how scientists and conservationists on both sides of the Atlantic, led by the Royal Society and the American Academy of Sciences, triumphantly fought for the atoll that few people had heard of before. He makes a powerful plea for the preservation of a scientific wonder that will remain in danger until the airfield plans are finally scrapped.