Deserts

by James Macmahon

This essential guidebook to the North American deserts, one in a distinguished Audubon Society series devoted to continental biomes, contains in outline just about all the natural-history information... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394731395
• ISBN13: 9780394731391
• Release Date: May 1985
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Length: 638 Pages
• Weight: 1.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.5" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

The Audubon Society Nature Guides - Deserts

A must have book for anyone hiking in the desert and anyone even just interested in the desert. Packed full of info about "everything" you will find in the desert .

Best designed guide

A most comfortable-to-use guide with a great layout & excellent quality in illustrations. Too bad it is out-of-print. Waterproof covers and sturdy cloth backstrip, made for prolonged use, we love it.

Excellent Guide for the Field

When I moved to Arizona from the Texas in 1988, I was given this guide as a gift. Now 12 years later the book is a lot more worn, but is still an indespensible part of my hiking gear. It is small in size and ruggedly bound, so is perfect for short and long hikes into the Arizona Desert. It provides a guide for plants (cacti, grasses, wildflowers, shrubs, trees) reptiles, amphibians (do not see much of these), insects, spiders, mamals, and birds. It has suscinct quarter to half page descriptions of each species (or genus)including a description, habitat, range, and interesting comments. The best part is that the color pictures are in a separate section, group by type above, with a reference to the page where a full description can be found. This is great when you are on the trail, see something and want to pull out the guide an quickly find a reference. You can either use its quick photo index (fruit hsape, bird shape) to go to a section of the photos, or more oftent go straight to the section of interest (i.e birds, etc) and quickly thumb through the pictures to find what you saw, then turn to the reference. It also has "readable: sections on each of the major US desert areas whihc you can read at leisure. The only two weak points I have found are the section on birds and references to non-desert parts of Arizona. Arizona is a major transit point for birds migrating north and south. Sometimes these "visitors" to Arizona are not listed. The Sonoran desert is also more than just flat land desert. It also incudes the "sky Island" mountains that spring up from the desert floor. This book provides a reference only so far up these "islands" and a second is really needed when hiking between the two.

A GREAT field guide!

Don't be fooled by the negative review displayed here! This field guide is really great. I worked as a parks Natural Reasources employee, and part of my job was identifying every plant and animal I came across, if I could. Now, no one field guide will ever have everything you need, but good field guides contain many entries, good descriptions of likely habitats as well as the organism itself, a concentration on the plants and animals one is actually likely to find as opposed to those that are incredibly rare or not likely to be located in whatever ecosystem you bought the book for, and helpful hints with those species whose identification is notoriously difficult or easily confused. This book has it ALL, and more, such as the wide range of organisms featured, beautiful color plates, and supplementary information about deserts. If you find this book hard to use in the winter, it may be because plant identification in the winter is ALWAYS much harder than during flowering and growing seasons. This is because flowers are not only the number one organ used to identify flowering plants, they are also used extremely frequently to classify them into different species in the first place! If you want the most desert field guide for your dollar (or other monetary unit) this is definately your book.