Plants and Trees Books

This is a book of fabulous pictures. We bought it to inspire paintings and other artwork for my brother. He absolutely loved it. You will look at it over and over. It's big, heavy, so colorful, and great for all ages. A good book to leave sitting out to inspire conversation, fill time, or appreciate the world around you.

Even people who aren't as avid about nature as I am have found this book to be simply spectacular. It was given to me as a Christmas present and promptly got passed around the room. People who only take a glance have bought their own copy! The large, professionally printed photographs will take your breath away, and the captions and stories are just as entertaining. This book is organized neatly into chapters, and its layout is stylish and modern.

Worth more than what you will pay, the images are pristinely clear, colorful, large, and just plain amazing. I am giving it to my 11 year old animal-loving son for Christmas, but I must confess, I want my own!

A perfect gift for that hard to shop for person on your list, or...the person who 'has everything!' This beautifully illustrated and timely piece of literature uses imagination, intoxicating photographic talent, and intreague creating this work of art, with everlasting beauty for all ages. The distinguished global vastness pulls the reader into its clutches and keeps them craving for the next page. The accompanying CD highlights the haunting sounds of the Rainforest and echos it's melodic and transcendent voice, escorting the listener to the very heart of the...Rainforest! A+++ Highly recommended.

When I purchased this book at the bookstore, I couldn't wait to get home to "devour" it! The photography is stunning, capturing the glistening water on the feet of a rainforest frog, a bug's terrifying view of a hairy tarantula, and the inquisitive look on a chimpanzee's face. Some photos focus on the details of a creature (like the patterns on a caterpillar) instead of the whole animal to provide a different, often-overlooked, perspective. In some areas there are series of photos to show the reader what is normally shown in video - leaf-cutter ants demolishing a leaf, cut-by-cut; the molting and emergence of a katydid from its old skeleton; the lazy-day movements of an orangutan in a tree.

Although the focus of the book is definitely the photography, the items are arranged under topics such as Diversity, Predators, Survival, and Cycles with accompanying educational articles. The reader definitely has an opportunity to learn and well as enjoy the wonderful photos.

The quality of the photography in this book is absolutely spectacular - Thomas Marent is tremendously talented. This photographic journal of his journey through the rainforest will truly fascinate and enchant the reader!

This is the first volume of the two volume herbal set.If you like classical literature and recipes,you will enjoy reading this book.Also has information on tonics and liniments for various aliments.Methods of harvesting and chemical dosages are discussed.And preparation of the extracts and tinctures are detailed.Some illustrations,from the root to the bud,are drawn clearly.Folk tales and cosmetic aspects are included.It's a bit old-fashioned ,yet it reads like an enchanting medieval Herbal Arthurian text. If you're a serious student of herbalism and classical studies,then you'll find this botanical set engrossing reading.

I enjoy this book because it has so many plants in it, even plants we don't usually consider herbs. It gives a lot of info about each plant listed. Very good!

Wish this was back in print in one volume but glad I was able to pick this up. One of the most invaluble resources I have give tons of wonderful information very comprehensive...love it. Only wish the pics of the plants were with each description instead of in their own lil groups.

I received my book in excellent condition and in very short order. I am pleased to add it to my library and am sure it will be well-used.

Although I preferred the older verison this is great for the beginner and advnce alike.

I thought I knew the woods. "Reading the Forested Landscape" allows you to see what is in front of you, but not seen. I will never look at a woods in the same way again. Tom Wessels does a masterful job of showing you how to "read" the landscape. The book is a "detective novel" of information. I will read it again and visit the woodlands and do a bit of detective work. Great fun.

...makes more sense after reading this book. The chapters give an introductory look at what you see when you walk through a forest and what it means to the ecosystem and to you if you're just curious or you are in wildlife management.

Before I read this book, I knew the woods had stories to tell; now, I can begin to understand them. This book is a forensic reference demystifying the clues the forest has to reveal. Each chapter describes, in depth, a particular setting and the clues found there. The drawings, unfortunately, are not as good or helpful as the writing. I would have preferred photographs, but it's only a small drawback.

See that tree? - that stone wall? - How about that mound of earth in the woods? Never noticed them before? Well this book will help you to discover all kinds of 'hidden' clues that help us to understand how the land was used in the past and what forces helped to make it the way it is today.

This is a wonderful book to read and then put into practice as you ramble around the wonderful landscapes of New England.

I have grown up in new england and studied the biological sciences for 20 years and Tom Wessel knowledge and wonderful insight to the natural world is amazing. the book is a wonderful read and I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys the outdoors and natures beauty.

My son loves this book so much that when it started falling apart, I bought another one! He asks for this book every night. Highly recommend!!

This book is beautifully illustrated. The vibrant colors invited my students to be actively engaged while we were reading it together. The rhyme scheme of the book made my students laugh and learn at the same time. Humor is always a good way to learn. I would reccomend this book to anyone.

This book has been a favorite in our home since we got it over 8 years ago. The pictures are beautiful and fun. The rhymes are great. It is one of the few books that I do not tire of reading over and over and over again to the kiddos.

Only draw-back is that it is permanately stuck in my head. Can't go to the zoo without finding myself saying the rhymes. Oh, who am I kidding, that's not a draw-back...it is kinda fun! hee hee

This book has been loved by all of my children, every one of my children old enough to talk have this book memorized.

This is such a cute book. Bright and colorful pictures to look at, with a story that isn't too repetitive. Readers will not mind reading time and again to children

A very nice book, with remarkable trees, however, from the cover I suppose I wrongly assumed they would be beautiful trees. Quite a lot of the book is spent on African trees of a very strange nature, and to my husband's suprise, very little was done on the banyan tree. I was looking forward to large, ancient trees myself. All in all, it is still a wonderful book, it just wasn't what we were expecting.

Great Book will enough the wonder hopefully they have it in the school systems or county systems

Trees are grouped by various, sensible categories that other books on trees might neglect: Giants: Gods, Goddesses, Grizzlies; Dwarfs: For Fear of Little Men, In Bondage; Methuselahs: The Living and the Dead, Shrines; Dreams: Prisoners, Aliens, Lovers and Dancers, Snakes and Ladders, Ghosts; and Trees in Peril: Do the Loggers always Win? and Ten Green Bottles. Pakenham's text is great fun to read, as can be viewed from those sectional titles, and individual tree titles such as "Tie up my feet, Darling, and I'll live forever" for the Bonsai tree that is the In Bondage section.

I suppose coffee table books really shouldn't be considered exceptional items to read - view, yes; read, not so much. This is an exception. Tolkien's Ents are invoked for a handful of trees, and rightly so; geography students who get a core borer stuck and (somehow) get permission to cut down what had possibly been the oldest tree in the world just to retrieve it are warned against; and, of course, it is mentioned that any fool can climb a gum tree. I've read this about six times this year, high time I count it officially.

beautiful book. Bought it as a gift for my brother.
I already have a copy for myself.

In fall 2006, Lansing's forestry department planted a tiny gingko biloba tree between the sidewalk and the street in front of my house.
It had four and a half branches, all oriented in one plane like the candlesticks in a menorah. You could barely roast a wiener with it.
I scrambled into the house for a book I had bought, by sheer coincidence, the previous day -- Thomas Pakenham's "Remarkable Trees of the World."
Yes! There, sprawling across pages 110 and 111, was a gingko nearly 1,000 years old, still living in Tokyo, measuring 30 feet in girth and 66 feet high.
Pakenham, a British historian with Irish wanderlust and a gentle sense of drama, has traveled the world to photograph and research the history and lore of 60 of the world's most remarkable trees.
This oversize book, just now out in paperback, is so relaxed and un-sensational you picture Pakenham walking from tree to tree, a Haydn string quartet playing in the background, not minding the continents and oceans in between. It's a follow-up to another book that's just as good: "Meetings With Remarkable Trees," in which Packenham confined his wanderings to the British Isles. The response to "Meetings" was so warm that Pakenham packed his bags and expanded his search to global proportions.
Pakenham's style is that of a curious, intelligent pilgrim. He pairs generous full-page or double-page images of his subjects with un-fussy, lightly conversational background information. He clearly respects local lore and legend, but doesn't go overboard with it, nor does he bog the text down in scientific details. The result is almost a set of personality profiles.
The images are spectacular -- given the subject matter, most of them can't help it -- but sensitively chosen and framed, with an eye toward the unique setting, mood and attributes of each tree.
It's a low-key approach, but if this book doesn't awaken your sense of awe, nothing can. That little stick of a gingko in my front yard, for example, belongs to a hyper-ancient species/order/family that predates dinosaurs. Its peculiar lineage (it's related to ferns) is betrayed by unique, fan-shaped leaves that have no central fold.
Of course, trees have their own agenda, and don't care whether they get into a coffee-table book or not (it's tempting to think they'd rather not, insofar as books are made of paper). But it was hard not to think of Pakenham's gargantuan gingko as a thundering encouragement for my little tree's stressed-out, brown-fringed leaves and spindly trunk.
For one thing, Japanese Buddhists believe the gingko, not the Bo tree of India, was the tree under which Buddha found enlightenment.
If lore doesn't thrill, Pakenham serves up history and science. For example, a gingko 800 yards from the epicenter of Hiroshima threw up new sprouts even after the atomic bomb hit.
But enough about gingkos. In this book, the reader will meet a panoply of the world's most amazing creatures: General Sherman, a mega-giant sequoia in California that weights 1,500 tons and is probably the largest living thing on Earth; ancient teapot-shaped African baobabs out of a Dr. Suess illustration; the leaning Italian cypress said to have been planted by St. Francis; wind-lashed cypresses clinging to the rocky California coast; great oaks with hollows where 20 people can sit down to a banquet; bristlecone pines now into their fifth millennium of existence.
Some of these magnificent trees are near roadsides or chained off in parks, all but ignored by passersby. The wonder of this book is that it tunes the mind to the low-frequency, centuries-long chords only these creatures can hear. Looking at trees that have lived the better part of a millennium make you wonder whether there will be a California -- the home of a disproportionate number of these giants -- or a Lansing in 1,000 years.
My bet's on Lansing, which is far less likely to slip into the ocean before my gingko grows up.

I happened to find this paperback version on the bargain shelf at Borders for $5, and I made the decision to buy it just on looking at the first photograph alone. Impulsive? Yeah, but I don't regret it at all. I just bought this book tonight, so I haven't actually read it yet. However, just looking at the photographs was mesmerizing. There are some really incredible trees out there in the world and I think the author has done a great job of capturing some of them. If you don't come across this book on a bargain shelf somewhere don't worry, it is well worth the price that Amazon is asking.

As I recall it, I first saw this book in 1996 or 1997 at the Midnight Special Bookstore in Santa Monica before they closed. The photographs of the trees were the most breathtaking photographs of trees I had ever encountered. I didn't buy the book then, but I remembered it for a long time afterward, and then my husband gave me a copy of it for Christmas a few years ago.

What I particularly like about this book - beside the photographs - is that it contains a Gazetteer at the back which tells the reader where the trees are located, what page they are pictured on, what kind of tree they are and whether they are accessible to the public, whether they are part of the Forest Enterprise or whether they are part of the National Trust. It also gives the reader a designation for Champion trees with full measurements. This is very handy and has saved me from having to pull all this information together myself.

My husband and I are going to be in Surrey this summer and we are looking forward to paying a visit to several of the trees mentioned - in particular - the Crowhurst Yew (pp. 120-21) and the Tandridge Yew (pp. 22-23) located in the churchyard at Tandridge in Surrey. These are probably the most spectacular. There are also several others at Kew Gardens which we are hoping to visit (tulip tree p. 61, hybrid strawberry p. 67, chestnut-leaved oak p. 71, maidenhair (Ginko), p. 83, Chinese wisteria p. 151, as well as the Knap Hill weeping beech p. 155, at the Knapp Hill Nursery in Surrey).

The introduction is very poignant. Pakenham recalls his encounters with trees which prompted him to create this book. He recalls a severe storm in Ireland in January, 1991, which toppled 12 out of 19, of his 200 year old, 100 foot high beech trees which once inhabited his garden - "all had been good friends to five generations of our family." "Why had I not looked at them more carefully before?" he asks.

This is an amazing book from the stunning photographs to the detailed stories about each remarkable tree. It is also scattered with beautifull 18thC etching of illustrated trees that refer to the tree being discussed.I found this book quite beautiful. I would definately recommend this book to anyone who is passionate about trees. Or to anyone who is looking for great photograhic reference as I was.

Pakenham's Meetings with Remarkable Trees and his Remarkable Trees of the World are portraits, not just pictures, each book documenting the impressive presence of sixty venerable trees from around the world. Pakenham groups them by their histories: Natives, Travelers, Shrines, Fantasies and Survivors. Each is a testimony to the majesty of Nature's creativity, diversity and adaptability.

Pakenham shares the unique history of each of these outstanding personalities, in the context of its species and its struggles for survival - ever threatened by man's over-cutting and under-husbandry of these irreplaceable resources.

Inspirational!

If you need a gift for a nature lover or photographer that you really like, this is the book for them. And get yourself a copy while you're at it.

Briefly, the author takes wonderful photographs of trees that affect and inspire him in Great Britain. Included with each tree is a history of the tree and facts and vignettes associated with the tree. His camera-work is impeccable and if you've ever tried to photograph a whole tree you will recognize the talent and work that have gone into this book.

The writing that accompanies the pictures is compelling and interesting. The author has obviously done his homework.

You can lose yourself for an hour at a time, or you can put this on your coffee table and get compliments from your guests, but have one in your library where you can get inspired and calm at the same time.

Loved this book - a keeper for sure. Rick Darke does a great job of writing - I found his prose to be both instructive and inspiring-one really gets a sense from his writing that he knows his plants in intimate and fond detail. Photography is stunning as he captures the spirit of the woodlands and plants he shows in the book. I especially love how he depicts the changing beauty & contrast throughout the seasons of a local scene as he drove by on his way to and from work. What a treat it is to be a gardener and have gems like this one to read and enjoy.

This man is the best photographer of the woodlands and a great speaker. Would purchase any book by him.

Whether you are planning a woodland garden, look out on a woodland garden, or just dream of woodland gardens, this book is a must have. It is the most beautiful, awe-inspiring garden book I've ever encountered.

The photos are the first layer of beauty. The descriptions of the plants are the second layer of beauty. The suggested arrangements of trees, shrubs and flowers are the third layer of beauty. You could spend weeks reading this book and not get through the layers. Mr. Darke has produced a true gift for those of us who treasure woodlands.

If you live near the edge of woodlands as we do, you'll find this book to be a valuable source of information. It's a challenge to landscape the transition from woodland to home, but this book provides the knowledge needed to make that happen. And if you love to live in or near woodland areas as much as we do, you'll appreciate the wonderful photographs.

I am a novice gardener but this book gives great advice and great choices from groundcover to shrubs and trees for the woodsy landscape. I refer to this book all the time.

This book was very helpful for the gardener with lots of trees and shrubs

If you're looking for a good basic book on pruning this is it. I purchased the Ortho book on Pruning and it was a terribe. I went to the library and rented several books on pruning and this was by far the best.

I kill plants! Not on purpose just some people are green thumb challenged. My husband and I bought quite a few fruit tree last summer and we had no idea how to prune them this book has saved me it is easy to understand(for those of us who are not gifted in yard care things) and easy to follow. It also is not a pruning for dummies book it really is for anybody I think even experienced gardeners would love it. It is just clean and uncomplicated.

An excellent guide for pruning everything in the garden. Diagrams are clear and easy to follow. After looking at more that 20 books on pruning, Pruning Made Easy was my choice and I am very satisfied.

I like this book so much - this is the third copy I have purchased this year! (I keep giving my copy away to family members who desperately need it.) The black line drawings are what keep bring me back to this one book for all of our pruning needs. We have berry bushes (some wild and some we planted ourselves), flowering shrubs, fruit trees, a bonzi tree, a dogwood, grape vines, 3 old Oaks trees and 2 young Walnut trees. This ONE BOOK has helped us to care for each of them according to their needs and age. It has helped turn my brown thumb into green.

Highly recommended for landscape design and
development of native gardens

I am a plant freak, and I am a gardening book freak. I have many, many books, probably too many. Literally. So many books that I've bought that looked interesting at the store have wound up sitting on the shelf, never to be opened again. This is one that will never even get to the shelf.

This book is so comprehensive, so informative, so beautiful to look at, and so danged readable that I find myself seeking it out whenever I've got a free moment. How many gardening books have you bought lately that poured forth all the information you could possibly want? How many have you bought lately that were a lot of fun to read? Now, how many can you name that do both at the same time? A precious few, but this one does.

Timber Press celebrated their 25th Anniversary this past year, and I did something I never do, I wrote the company a letter. In essence, what I said was this, "I never mind buying a Timber Press Book, often sight unseen, because I know it will be good." This book is excellent, even by Timber Press standards.

If you have any interest in trees or gardening, you will find this book a "must have." Informative, enjoyable, beautiful. What else could you want?

This outstanding new book will become one of the primary references for all kinds of information about native woody plants of North America. Many of the plant descriptions have far more detailed information on culture, diseases, and ornamental characteristics than the widely known reference books by Michael Dirr (the 'standards' by which all other woody plant references are judged). While the intent is to provide information and promote the ornamental characteristics of native woody plants, for home gardeners and landscape professionals, this will also prove to be a valuble reference for naturalists and others mainly interested in these plants in the native, rather than the cultivated, landscape. The photographs are outstanding, and will certainly promote interest in many little known and underutilized woody plants. I never knew there were so many native North American oaks! As a botanist and later home gardener with a life-long interest in woody plants, there are few books in the past decade which have been published with this level of detail and value.

Guy Sternberg and Jim Wilson's Native Trees For North American Landscapes represents a lifetime of research and work: the authors provide an in-depth technical catalog of detail on native trees and their environments, providing tree 'profiles' which describe flowers, fruit, plant ranges, and culture. Sections outlining best seasonal features are particularly useful, telling gardeners which plants are showiest per season. Stunning photos and outlines of common cultivation problems and solutions make Native Trees For North American Landscapes a solid, invaluable reference for landscapers, libraries and home gardens alike.

This is one of, if not the best book about trees you can buy. It is informative for the amateur as well as the pro. The pictures are beautiful, my favorite is of the Burr Oak photographed in a horse pasture. I waited over a year for this book, well worth it! I consider myself an amateur arborist and would highly reccomend this book to anyone with an interest in trees and nature in general. I do not see an underlying agenda by the author, just useful information and honest opinions.

_The Tapir's Morning Bath_ by Elizabeth Royte is an interesting look at the world of field biologists working in the American tropics. The author spent about a year living and working with scientists at a scientific station that was located on Barro Colorado Island (often abbreviated as BCI), an isle that rises steeply from near the middle of Gatun Lake, the enormous midsection of the Panama Canal. Isolated by the waters of the Chagres River (dammed in 1910 to form the canal), BCI was once the highest peak of the now submerged Loma de Palenquilla range. Its summit rises 119 meters above the lake's surface and covers some 1,564 hectares or about 6 square miles.

The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) runs a lab on the island's northeastern shore, a facility that has operated continuously since 1923, its backyard the most-studied tropical rain forest in the world. The preservation of the island and the lab was the brainchild of James Zetek, a U.S. Department of Agriculture entomologist who had been working on mosquito control in the Canal Zone during its construction.

The island is a nearly ideal laboratory for researchers. It is home to 65 terrestrial mammal species (including agoutis, peccaries, deer, sloths, howler monkeys, anteaters, tayras, and tapirs), 70 bat species, 381 bird species, 58 species of reptiles (including crocodiles), 32 amphibian species, and 1,369 species of vascular plants, including 300 tree species. The animals are reached by a series of maintained trails and some are so well studied that good population figures are had for a number of species (there are about 2,500 agoutis on the island for instance).

In order to ease her way into the island residents' culture and also to get a handle on both what life is like as a field biologist and what it was they were studying, Royte volunteered to be a free field assistant to anyone who wanted her. At first the scientists were reluctant but soon she was eagerly sought by a variety of researchers. The heart of the book is really her work in the field with these biologists, describing both what they were studying and the field biologists themselves, what motivated them, what they hoped to achieve, and their views on both their research subjects and larger issues in science.

One scientist she spent a lot of time in the field with was Chrissy Campbell, who was doing a study of spider-monkeys. Her study a difficult one, requiring her to follow the island's one spider-monkey troop all day until it bedded down at 6pm and then be back in the field at 6am to follow it again (if she was late she had to spend all day locating it and was often not successful). She sought to collect fecal samples from the troop's five adult females and record their behavior, hoping that analysis of the samples in the lab and correlation with the behaviors she recorded would reveal information on female hormones, adult behavior, and the relationship between the two.

Another scientist she worked with was Bret Weinstein, who was doing a study of tent making in bats. This behavior (which consisted of a bat biting and bending leaves into shapes to conceal and protect them as they slept) was noted to have evolved three separate times among bats and was found only among small, canopy fruit eating bats of the American tropics. Weinstein hoped to discover the reasons behind the tent-making, a job that kept him up all hours of the night, running through the jungle at night chasing faint signals on radio transmitters he attached to some of his study subjects.

She was field assistant to Paul Trebe, himself a field assistant to a scientist who was back at his university in the U.S. His laborious daily job was to visit scores of traps every morning on BCI and on several small adjacent islands (one island had 99 traps) for the nocturnal spiny rat, collecting information on that species population size, age structure, sex ratio, and reproductive output, which along with manipulating conditions on some of the small islands enabled the scientist back home to do complicated studies that impacted on such issues as the animal's role in seed dispersal and as a reservoir for infectious agents.

Other researchers Royte worked with included a geologist studying the forest's effects on runoff and the canal watershed, two scientists doing a diversity study of lianas, and a researcher studying the effects of leaf-cutter ants on tree growth.

While in the field and talking to the island's residents, Royte noted that there was a rivalry between field biologists and those who worked in laboratories. Field scientists often had a "working-class pride," and "cultivated a spunky disdain for lab jocks." She said that pure animal-behavior studies were "decidedly out of fashion in these molecular times" and was perceived by many as a "soft" science. Many on the island griped that molecular biologists got the lion's share of money and prestige, though some did acknowledge they provided useful insights (particularly in the area of taxonomy).

Royte pondered the often incredibly narrow focus of researchers there, joking once that she "damned tropical biology as a black-art discipline and scientists as high priests of esoterica." Sometimes researchers labored on projects that seemed to have little application and gained deep knowledge about very narrow aspects of an organism but were often "ignorant of the whole." Royte wrote that the increasing number of scientists and decreasing amounts of funding available (consumed partially by huge university bureaucracies) forced scientists to specialize early, to carve out a niche that no else had in order to "avoid competition and make names for themselves." She also noted that sometimes seemingly very arcane research results can yield surprising answers to larger puzzles.

A very good book, I enjoyed her descriptions, the obvious research she did, and a subject she came back to repeatedly in the book, why tropical rain forests are so diverse.

This is a really good book! I'm a biologist and I'm currently in Panama and I've spent the last couple of years in Central America. I can assure you that this is an excellent work about biologists, research, and life in Central America.

The writing is straight ahead, no flourishes of flounces to get in the way. The story is simple but clear and funny and heartwarming. I don't know what more you can ask for in a book.

The BCI Research Station is one of the last great centers for basic research into topical ecology. While it is being taken over, gradually, by biologists who know everything about what's going on inside the cell wall but cannot tell a Red Deer from a Bulldog, there are still enough who are trying to understand what animals and plants are doing and what is the relationship between them.

Whether you intend to travel to the rain forest or not, this is a good read and you will enjoy it. I did and I highly recommend it.

Imagine riding a rickety train through the forest to a boat launch, boarding a tiny boat to an obscure island where six foot long iguanas drape nonchalantly over the paths. Imagine an evening in a screened in porch, much of that screen covered with 6" beige flying cockroaches. Imagine a creature not unlike a raccoon, called a coatimundi, traipsing over from the trash bins the following morning to sniff and greet you. Imagine a tapir standing mysteriously in the brush nearby as howler monkeys howl and cackle overhead, throwing debris from the upper story of the forest.

Some twenty two years ago, I had the great privilege of experiencing exactly this as a young girl, spending a year with the many American biologists steadily working in the jungles and facilities of Panama, including several stays on Barro Colorado Island (BCI).

While I freely confess that I have not yet read this book, I was utterly delighted to find that someone, at last, has documented the important yet seemingly obscure research being conducted in this tropical stronghold. I plan to purchase this book for as many friends as possible, knowing that our awareness of biodiversity will ultimately hold the key to funding needed research into the mysteries and wonders of this wild and vital terrestrial treasure chest.

Ms. Royte has written the book that I've always wanted to write. I've done my share of hanging out with biologists and archeologists at field sites in Central America watching them undertake tedious and lengthy data collections under uncomfortable situations. She captures how caught up these people can be in the work they do and how hard it can be for them to relate and function in social situations. Toward the end of the book she describes the migration of the Urania butterflies. I live in Panama City and there is a migration going on outside my window right now. Only it is much more enjoyable after reading Ms. Royte's explanation of what is going on.

On the trail of the scientists who make the trails

A journalist follows researchers into the South American rain forest to study the mystery of their devotion

By Diana Muir

Deep in the tropical rain forest, a small fruit-eating bat carefully nicks the veins on the underside of a philodendron leaf, causing the edges to fold down like a miniature tent. The bat curls up under its little tent and goes to sleep. Other bats don't make tents, why do these?
In "The Tapir's Morning Bath," journalist Elizabeth Royte follows field biologists into the rain forest with a similar question: Other people, after all, do not feel compelled to sit up all night being bitten by mosquitoes, ticks, and chiggers. Why do these?

The Panama Canal is made up of a channel leading inland from each coast, joined by an immense manmade lake that covers what was once a rain forest. Numerous islands dot the lake. In the 1920s, a group of foresighted scientists managed to have the largest, Barro Colorado, with its nearly intact tropical forest, set aside as a scientific preserve.

In these pages, the present-day researchers of Barro Colorado spring vividly to life. Royte follows a young biologist from UC Berkeley, as the biologist follows a troop of spider monkeys.

Studying monkeys like this entails long days of trailing the agile little creatures as they skitter through the treetops, clambering easily from branch to branch. For an earth-bound researcher, keeping up with the troop entails scrambling up steep ravines, pushing through tangled undergrowth, and skidding down hillsides slick with rain. The early weeks are especially frustrating, as distrustful monkeys shy away from the interloper.

Royte, a New York journalist, is as much an interloper on the island as this scientist is among the troop of monkeys. The scientists, after all, have paid their dues to get here. They have spent years in graduate school, and they reach Barro Colorado only after their laboriously planned studies survive rigorous review to be selected for funding.

But Royte ingratiates herself by offering to help. On the island, these scientists work long hours, and conversation can be larded with arcane jargon incomprehensible to an outsider. She's willing to wade through this - and the muck of mangrove swamps - to hang insect traps on branches and sit on the forest floor counting the number of leaf-cutter ants that march past.

As they whiz across the lake in a Boston whaler, Royte is determined to pursue her subject at full throttle, even as the distinguished biologist perched in the bow tries to net moths without falling overboard. He shares his excitement about the natural world in all its magnificent complexity.

For instance, he tells her, urania moths migrate annually. Some years, however, only a few hundred appear. Other years, several hundred million moths fly past the island. No one knows where they come from or where they are bound. In Royte's retelling, scientific enthusiasm is infectious. Soon we, too, want to know what drives these winged nomads.

Readers will come away from "The Tapir's Bath" with an appreciation of the way narrow research questions become the material from which useful knowledge is constructed. But don't read it for that.

Read it for the thrill of the chase. Will the young researcher from Berkeley who has trudged the forest for three days without so much as a glimpse of a non-human primate ever locate her spider-monkey troop? Will the German biologist whose sophisticated equipment fails manage to contrive an impromptu method to measure the effect of leaf-cutting ants on the trees they harvest? And will the PhD candidate from the University of Michigan astound his professors by synthesizing a new theory to explain why biological diversity decreases with distance from the equator, or fulfill their expectations by failing even to discover why bats make tents?

And just why does a tapir take a morning bath?

* Diana Muir is the author of 'Bullough's Pond,' winner of the 2001 Massachusetts Book Award