The Animal Dialogues
Uncommon Encounters in the Wild
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4.7 • 23 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
From one of the finest nature writers at work in America today-a lyrical, dramatic, illuminating tour of the hidden domain of wild animals.
Whether recalling the experience of being chased through the Grand Canyon by a bighorn sheep, swimming with sharks off the coast of British Columbia, watching a peregrine falcon perform acrobatic stunts at 200 miles per hour, or engaging in a tense face-off with a mountain lion near a desert waterhole, Craig Childs captures the moment so vividly that he puts the reader in his boots.
Each of the forty brief, compelling narratives in The Animal Dialogs focuses on the author's own encounter with a particular species and is replete with astonishing facts about the species' behavior, habitat, breeding, and lifespan. But the glory of each essay lies in Childs's ability to portray the sometimes brutal beauty of the wilderness, to capture the individual essence of wild creatures, to transport the reader beyond the human realm and deep inside the animal kingdom
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In these eloquent essays, naturalist and adventurer Childs (House of Rain) describes some of his extraordinary experiences with creatures from wasps, red-spotted toads and hummingbirds to grizzly bears, coyotes and jaguars. Seeking entr e into animal societies, he interprets messages left in marks on the ground and in scents on leaves and trees, and communicates with animals directly using their own language of stares, gestures, postures, sounds, scents and gaits. He goes looking for animals alone in hazardous wilderness areas tracking mountain goats in Colorado's Gore Range or surprising a secret society of ravens in a canyon in Utah. Always longing to be at one with animals, he is not afraid to climb an aspen to see the world from a porcupine's perspective, run with a herd of elk or wonder how it would feel to jump from a plane and fly with a bald eagle. Childs's captivating essays, rich in sensuous imagery (the porcupine "looks like a mop, a bundle of ponderosa pine needles, a mobile hairstyle"), are hauntingly beautiful and replete with evocative observations of animal life. 42 b&w illus.
Customer Reviews
Amazing!
I didn’t realize that I’m living in the same time as our generations John Muir. Inspiring me to do more wilderness camping, where, as the author says
“Days lose their names.”
The Animal Dialogues
Beautifully written. A glimpse into the wild heart still beating around us, in pockets of the Southwestern desert and Pacific Northwest to name a couple of geographic areas featured in this lovely book. Craig Childs is very knowledgeable about the animals he has observed in his wanderings and this book is filled with fascinating information.