A Desert Calling: Life in a Forbidding Landscape.

Michael A. Mares

Mares, a field biologist, disputes the common belief that desert regions are inhospitable to life. Over the past 30 years, Mares has lived in the deserts of Argentina, Iran, Egypt, and the United States and has studied small mammals that live and thrive there. In A Desert Calling, he paints amazing portraits of the ways rodents and other creatures--some unknown to scientists until Mares found them--adapt to this hot, dry terrain. For instance, the plains vizcacha rat of Argentina uses the hair around its mouth--like a bark stripper in a sawmill--to shave away the salt covering the leaves of saltbrush and get at the edible tissue beneath. Some tiny armadillos stay in a cool environment by swimming through the sand. And the white-throated wood rat is a master carpenter that crafts its predator-deterring nests out of spiny cacti. Mares makes his case for fieldwork over lab study and encourages his peers to become "foot soldiers of natural history." Lively descriptions of his own experiences in the wild make the idea quite tempting. HUP, 2002, 318 p., b&w photos, hardcover, $29.95.