Reviews (1)

Salmon Country Revisited
Salmon Country Revisited

Salmon Country is a good overview of the natural phenomena of the pacific salmon, how it is related to our culture in the Pacific Northwest and the consequence of our lax terrestrial and aquatic ecosystem management that has lead to declines in salmon populations and extinction of some salmon races. I would like to have seen Busch give more than a very brief mention to the major accomplishments of the of the International Pacific Salmon Fisheries Commission from 1937 to 1985. Formed as a joint effort between Canada and the USA in 1937, the Commission was charged with, among other things, restoring the sockeye salmon runs on the Fraser River in British Columbia. This was accomplished through the construction of fishways principally at Hells Gate on the Fraser (later at other locations where flow restrictions occurred), regulation of commercial salmon catches, and a research program to understand the population biology of the various stocks of sockeye salmon in the Fraser River watershed. Fish hatcheries were not a part of that program (a misstatement by Busch, p.99, first sentence) in contrast to programs
developed in the US that depended heavily on hatchery produced salmon. That the Commission's programs were a success is seen in the fact that runs increased from a low of 1.6 to 3.3 million sockeye in the period of 1917 to 1949 to an average of 10.2 million sockeye from 1983 to 1986. Busch and his book would have benefited from reading John Roos' publication "Restoring Fraser River Salmon" published by the Pacific Salmon Commission, Vancouver, Canada, 1991. ... Read more

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The Peterson Field Guide series has set the measure for such guides since Roger Tory Peterson invented the modern version in 1934 with his Field Guide to the Birds. The Peterson series, with nearly 50 titles, now covers everything from beetles and mushrooms to wildflowers and atmosphere, plus all manner of birding books, and fishes, too. This Field Guide to Atlantic Coast Fishes of North America adheres to high Peterson standards, with detailed descriptions of over 1,000 species, nearly 1,100 illustrations (420 of which are in color), and up-to-date information on range, habitat, swimming depths, water temperatures, and salinity.

The pictures help vastly with identification, clearly showing the differences between the spotfin hogfish and the red hogfish, the painted wrasse, Creole wrasse, and clown wrasse, not to mention the slippery Dick and puddingwife. Opposite the picture page, each fish gets a short written description, pointing out, for instance, that the Beaugregory is relatively slender and dark, with pale-centered scales, while the purple reeffish is dark blue with a bright-blue line on the upper rim of the eye. And a page number follows the thumbnail sketch, directing you to a more in-depth description of each fish, telling what it looks like when young, as well as its size and habitat range. Covering fishes from the Labrador Sea down to the Caribbean, this is an excellent reference text for inquisitive seaside vacationers and casual snorkelers as well as ichthyologists and amateur fish enthusiasts. --Stephanie Gold ... Read more

Reviews (2)

Simply on of the best
Simply one of the two best books for identifying books in this region (southeastern United States and Caribbean) -- that's from personal knowledge/experience. Literally, every fish we've ever caught has been in this soft-cover 130+ page gem.

Rube Allen, a former Sports/Fishing writer from a St. Petersburg FL newspaper, is experienced (first hand) and shares a wealth of informtion. Not only do you see what the fish looks like, you'll know where it haunts, what it feeds on, if it's edible, (food-value) and lots of other intersting information in a concise format (basically, a paragraph or two/three per fish).....

Anyway, though I'm only experienced with the fish in this region, the information contained is accurate and useful. I believe from that, you may safely assume that the fishes found elsewhere would have accurate information as well.

Continuing, aboard our boat we had numerous books. This (and one other -- Florida Fishing by Gordon Lewis) were the two most frequently referenced fish books we owned. My own copy is ragged, taped together and full of notes. Any copy would be a valuable addition to your collection.

Buy it!

A must have
I have an entire shelf of fish books, and this one has been there the longest. It's great for quick references and is full of drawings of 100s of species of fish. A must have ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Many Splendored Fishes
I bought this book back in 1990 and have used it many times in our 14 trips to Hawaii. The small print allows for a lot of information to be packed into the book's small size. The drawings of the fish are accurate and colorful. The 166 fish described in the book depict a good cross section of the fishes found on the Hawaiian reefs. ... Read more

Book Description

Engagingly written, with both learning and humor, Fish bridges thegap between purely pictorial books and scholarly texts, and provides a succinctsummary of fish biology and conservation for students and fish enthusiasts. ... Read more

Reviews (2)

Still the bible
If you need a single volume that summs up everything concerning salmon biology, this is it. Extensive chapters on all Pacific salmon species. Easy reading and can be a good reference for biology undergrads in university.

Excellent Book on Salmon
I recently received this book, after waiting to get it for about 2 months. It is the most informative book about salmon ever, with information on everything salmon. It has few color pictures, but has some very interesting statistics in black and white. Though it does not express a view about the declining salmon populations, I'm sure you can find the reasons in the book. It had a lot of facts, but believe me, it would take a lifetime to read through the whole book.
Why 4 stars and not 5? It was relatively boring. Unlike other books I've read about salmon, this one was developed like a textbook. I recommend it to someone who wants to know everything they can about salmon, not someone looking for some bed-reading. ... Read more

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Freeman House lives in an out-of-the-way place. Tucked away where Highway 101 diverts inland from the Northern California coastline to avoid the 4,000-foot peaks of the King Range is a damp, verdant landscape of rolling hills, towering forests, and isolated pockets of humanity. The Mattole River drains much of the area, greeting the Pacific at the Lost Coast. For thousands of years, the river formed the connective tissue of human settlement--first for the native tribes, and later for Euro-American pioneers. Each year, salmon swam up the river to their natal spawning beds, marking the passage of time and providing sustenance for the people along the banks. Then, in the early 1970s, the salmon stopped returning. House found himself banding with other like-minded citizens in an effort to bring the once-prolific runs back. Their organization fought for curbs on logging in the watershed and more restrictions for the way timber can be harvested (buffer zones along streams, for example). They planted vegetation on the banks to provide shade and added structure to the river for protection.

Totem Salmon is House's memoir of river stewardship. It's also a blueprint for grassroots environmental action. And finally, it is a well-crafted and lyrical piece of writing that treats a regional problem with personal perspective and candor. --Langdon Cook ... Read more

Reviews (6)

Save the salmon
Excellent book. Interesting read. Inspiring call to action.

Powerful
Briefly...as an environmentalist from both the non-profit, agency and barefoot,dreadlocked worlds I really appreciated this book. The author brings out the complexity and poetry of the technical, natural and spiritual mosaic involved in watershed work in the northwest (and eveywhere for that matter). For anyone who has ever (or even never) been through similar experiences that the author describes, it brings shivers up the spine with the descriptive imagery and his obvious intimacy with the Mattole. I highly recommend this book.

Wonderful Read Out Loud Quotes
I read a lot, but I almost never pin my husband down to read him sections of a book. When I was reading Totem Salmon, I couldn't help it. I kept saying, "Listen to this one." I owned a home in the Mattole River Watershed in the late 70's and early 80's. I was amazed at how well Freeman House captures the essence of the area and the people without caricaturing either. Over and over he writes a few sentences which really "get it right" in explaining the landscape, the weather or the people of the area. This is not an easy "how-to" book on bringing back the salmon, but it brings out why it is worth the effort for as long as it takes.

Learning from Life, Nurturing Place
The book is a first-person account telling the story of a group of people who have dedicated themselves to rehabbing a river, a watershed, and saving some special strains of wild Pacific salmon stock. They decided to use salmon-hatchery technology (and other procedures) as a way to learn from the native salmon, rather than to introduce non-native species to their river. Freeman House is a truly impressive thinker and writer. His engaging intelligence is not just wide and deep, like a rockclimber his awareness gets into some unfamiliar and little-explored crevices of life - nature and human nature. House and his cohorts are questers who may ultimately discover something as important as did William Harvey or Sir Albert Howard. I'm tempted to call the book a riveting read, but the experience is warmer than that metaphor implies. It's hopeful. A strangely wise book.

Salmon splash in your heart.
From "Totem Salmon - Life Lessons from Another Species" by Freeman House -

"My straining senses slow down the sound so that each of its parts can be heard separately. A hiss, barely perceptible, as the fish muscles itself right out of its living medium; silence like a dozen monks pausing too long between the strophes of a chant as the creature arcs through the dangerous air; a crash as of a basketball going through a plate glass window as he or she returns to the velvet embrace of the water; and then a thousand tiny bells struck once only as the shards of water fall and the surface of the stream regains its viscous integrity."

"I flick on my headlamp and the whole backwater pool seems to leap toward me. The silver streak that crosses the enclosure in an instant is a flash of lightning within my skull, one which heals the wound that has separated me from this moment -- from any moment. The encounter is so perfectly complex, timeless, and reciprocal that it takes on an objective reality of its own. I am able to walk around it as if it were a block of carved stone. If my feelings could be reduced to a chemical formula, the experience would be a clear solution made up of equal parts of dumb wonder and clean exhilaration, colored through with a sense of abiding dread. I could write a book about it."

And here it is.

The Mattole River, where this story takes place, flows from the northwestern tip of California's Mendocino County, first a dozen miles northeast and then about sixty miles northwest through remote rural Humboldt County to its mouth at Petrolia. What keeps the river from reaching the Pacific Ocean any sooner is the King Range rising precipitously from the "Lost Coast", a stretch of beach frequented only by hikers and the occasional small plane.

Getting to the Mattole from the freeway is at least an hour's drive on winding country roads. This area, like much of Humboldt County, was logged in the fifties and sixties, and in the late sixties and seventies a substantial portion of it was sold to urban refugees, "reinhabitants". Over the next three decades, quite a few of them committed to the task of restoring the watershed to health. Two of these were David Simpson and Freeman House who together conceived and founded the Mattole Watershed Salmon Support Group. "Totem Salmon" tells the story of this work.

Salmon are an indicator species. Their health, as a population, closely tracks the health of the watershed to which they return. If you want to know how well a river valley is doing in the Pacific Northwest, look at the salmon runs, if there are any left. The principal enemy of the salmon is silt, produced by erosion usually from badly built roads and culverts, and from logging. Salmon need clean gravel in the streambed for eggs to survive and hatch. Well forested valleys with little erosion provide the best stream habitat for hatching and rearing salmon.

In 1950, before logging, it is recalled by the older Mattole valley residents, that, when they were running, "you could walk across the river on the backs of the salmon". In 1980, before restoration work began, the runs were down to perhaps 200 fish. More, those fish were the last wild salmon run in the state.

Looking back after reading the book, one could see the first phrase, "I am alone...", as a key to the work. Rooted in an explicit sense of self, spiraling out through sensory subtleties of immediate nature, to the larger cultural complexities, Mr. House melds what are usually seen as distinct worlds into a coherent portrait of a personal and multi-species reality. Like the salmon traversing the several worlds of ocean, river, air and creek, the personal, philosophical, cultural, historical, administrative, ecological, and cosmic threads are finely woven into a narrative yielding a shimmering presence of spirit and nature.

The book is a deeply enjoyable memoir of a long personal relationship with salmon. Along the way we see the history of the Euro-American relationship with this species, and that of the Native-American people who were here managing these watersheds long before. We learn of the state and federal administrative context of salmon management and the history of our, first, ignorance, and then, study of the anadromous species and their rivers. In clear and moving images, and with affection and humor, we see the people on the Mattole River who have joined hands for eighteen years to rescue this last wild run of salmon from extinction. Lastly we see the hopeful results and the tenuous circumstances of their work.

We might expect it to be a text for salmon restoration, and while the specifics are there they are widely scattered throughout the book. More attention is given to the wider question of how we got here, and how we can get through this to a more wholesome, rooted, and appreciative life in our particular place. If it is a text -- and Mr. House would say it is not -- it is a meta-instructional one, showing a way to become a people who will do the right thing for the watershed and thus for the salmon. The personal explorations in the book demonstrate by example the message beneath the text: by immersing ourselves in the reality of our local valley we can rescue both the health of our watersheds and our sense of ourselves. In the end, we see that they are the same journey; the salmon reflect to us our understanding of self and place.

The epilogue quotes Paul Schell, Mayor of Seattle, "Ironically, as we work to save the salmon, it may turn out that the salmon save us." ... Read more

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Teddy bears and ducklings, eat your heart out--there's nothing cuterthan a red-eyed tree frog. And award-winning photographer Nic Bishop (The Secrets of Animal Flight) roamed through the rain forests of Central America with rolls and rolls of high-speed film to prove it. Preschoolers will be captivated by the slice-of-life story that Joy Cowley and Bishop tell of this adorable amphibian: "Here is an iguana. Frogs do not eat iguanas. Do iguanas eat frogs? The red-eyed tree frog does not wait to find out." Sharp close-up photographs of near misses with a snake, a long froggy leap, a moth lunch, and a little, eyelid-exposing nap mesh perfectly with Cowley's engaging narrative. The "Did You Know?" section in the back recounts the ins and outs, ups and downs of tree-frog life. (Ages 3 to 5) --Karin Snelson ... Read more

Book Description

On December 2, 2001, the Galápagos Marine Reserve will officially become a World Heritage Site. Few people are more intimately connected with the Galápagos and its marine life than Pierre Constant, author of the best-selling guide to Galápagos, also from Odyssey guides. Constant now offers us Marine Life of the Galápagos, a definitive guide that introduces many new species of marine life never before seen, and rich with stunning color photography and underwater shots. This book is geared specifically to divers, an extremely fast-growing market in the archipelago. Dive centers are mushrooming on Santa Cruz Island; in 1991, 5,000 divers visited the islands, compared with 22,000 in 1999—currently 25% of visitors to the Galápagos are directly involved in diving activities. In 2000, the Galápagos was voted best dive destination overall in the Indo-Pacific by the US-based Magazine Divers Trust/Rodale's Scuba Diving. This destination also won best fish life, healthiest marine environment, best big animal dives, and best advanced diving categories. This guide promises to be the bible of diving in the Galápagos.

• Brand-new guidebook focusing exclusively on marine life and diving in the Galápagos • 240 superb color photographs with stunning underwater shots, including of a significant number of new species never before published • Written by a world-acclaimed expert on the Galápagos with an undeniable love of diving and marine life and many years experience • Easy-to-use maps, plans and diving information • Authoritative and informative text on the marine life and best dive sites • 240 color photos * 20 maps ... Read more

Reviews (3)

A dream come true!
A good reference book for my dive trip to the Galapagos Is. I could find in the pictures, everything I saw underwater, with all the information a diver needs, from fish and marine invertebrates description, to the dive sites with detailed maps. The photos are very good. The reader can apreciate the efforts done by the author, in the plate drawings, creating an interest to get knowledge about whales or dolphins, for example. A really big improvement from the first edition, this new edition stands out as QUALITY! A beautiful souvenir for my "Dream come true".

an impressive showcase
Correction: the book is not 280 pages but 308 pages, does not have 240 pictures but 288 colour photos on fish and marine life.Very few people have dedicated 18 years of their life to achieve such a remarkable piece of work, in both information and photographs. Constant had published a earlier book with the same title in 1992; this one is a considerable improvement. Sure, you could also get a copy of Jack Grove's "Fishes of the Galapagos", over 800 pages and worth a few hundred dollars, with pure rock botom scientific information. Not for the average diver, though.

Mediocre book on fabulous place and wildlife
For my return to the Galápagos, and as a long time SCUBA diver and marine enthusiast (over 45 years), I was looking for a book that would be an all around field guide to the marine critters. Unfortunately, =this is not that book=. The layout is inconvenient, requiring one to move back and forth between a description of the animal and its photo- which often enough, turns out to be murky and not very revealing. The descriptions are brief to the point of being sketchy and forgetting some vital information, and there are some noticeable typographical errors. Though some of the information and citations are up-to-date, many are so old they verge on misinformation, and important books (Humann and DeLoach's book, for instance, are missing entirely from the non-annotated bibliography. Based on my personal experience diving with sharks and the data available during the last ten years, this book's information on sharks especially is misleading, out of date and overly alarming. Some of the island and dive site maps are crudely drawn- I have seen better drawn on white boards at dive briefings.

Unfortunately, this appears to be THE field-totable book available at the moment on this topic, and that's why I have it. Here's hoping Msr. Constant revises, adds and updates his book- it could be a blessing. I do not recommend buying this book unless you NEED it. ... ... Read more

Reviews (2)

BLAND
Have ordered many books by Gerald R. Allen, and was not impressed with this one. Was returned.

Good reference for diver and angler
I am a scuba diver who has a passionate to any kind of marine life. This book is not a complete reference, however, if you need to know a specific fish's name you found in Indonesia and other area nearby then this is the book you must have. ... Read more

Book Description

Here is detailed information on setting up and maintaining an outdoor pond, on selecting koi specimens, and on maintaining the perfect environment for this hardy breed of carp. A brand-new title in the growing Mini Encyclopedia Series for aquarium hobbyists, this book helps aquarium owners plan, create, and maintain a colorful and interesting environment for fish and aquatic life. Each volume provides in-depth information and instruction on a specific subdivision of fish keeping. Complementing the text are sets of illustration panels filled with full-color photos, each with its own detailed and instructive caption. The team of authors, all recognized aquarium experts, show readers how to set up an aquarium, select species, and maintain an optimal environment for the tank’s aquatic and plant life. Approximately 250 color photos and illustrations in each volume. ... Read more

Book Description

Salmon Nation takes you behind the headlines in the company of six knowledgeable guides to a deeper understanding of the most celebrated fish of western North America.Thoughtful essays by Native American writer Elizabeth Woody, fisheries biologist Jim Lichatowich, journalist Richard Manning, former commercial fisherman Freeman House, and writer Seth Zuckerman trace the relationship between people and salmon from the days of abundance that sustained the Northwest Coast cultures to the troubled world of salmon today, and suggest a future of rivers restored and fishing livelihoods revived- a future still within our reach.Geographer Dorie Brownell's full-color maps of the state of Pacific salmon today, published here for the first time, offer a powerful "big picture" perspective that lends a new urgency to efforts to heal the breach between between people and salmon. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Great Book
Salmon Nation is a fascinating look at how the people, and salmon, of the Pacific Northwest have lived together for so long, and how they are now both threatened. Very informative, evocative read. ... Read more

Book Description

"Salmon" is an authoritative, informative look at all seven main salmon species: the Atlantic, chinook, sockeye, coho, masu, pink, and the chum. Accessible to all ages, "Salmon" charts the evolution, origins, life cycles, and amazing migrations of these species and discusses their place in the complex and delicate structure of nature.

Also recommended: "Alligators & Crocodiles," "Loons," and "Swans."

Discover the world's animals in the WorldLife Library from Voyageur Press. This highly acclaimed series brings you the latest research from leading naturalists, along with stunning color photographs of your favorite animals. ... Read more

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I just know!
Actually, I have not had an opportunity to review this book, but I have never read anything by GC that was not right on target. He is a regular contributor to The Fisherman weekly and his tips have always been helpful. I'll write more after I read it! ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Very useful keys
I have used this book in numerous fish surveys in Michigan, and have found the keys to be extremely useful, easy to use, and well illustrated. It and Scott & Crossman's "Freshwater Fishes of Canada" are almost the only fish ID books I use. A caveat - its broad geographic scope makes it less useful than regional keys, if they exist for your area. ... Read more

Book Description

The first book devoted entirely to the natural history of the forty-four species of amphibians now known to occur within the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Includes maps, color photos, and a glossary and bibliography. Provides the first illustrated key to the identification of amphibian larvae geared specifically for the Southern Appalachians. ... Read more