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Book Review: Kaufman Focus Guide: Mammals of North America

Kaufman Focus Guide: Mammals of North America by Nora Bowers, Rick Bowers, and Kenn Kaufman. Houghton Mifflin (Houghton Mifflin Company, 222 Berkeley Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02116), 352 pages, 4 7/8 x 7 3/4, $22.00, paper.

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The third volume in the Kaufman Focus Guide series covers North America's mammals (the first two were Birds and Butterflies) and as this book shows, this series is really coming into its own. Kenn Kaufman, working here again with wildlife photographers Rick and Nora Bowers, is overcoming the traditional shortcomings associated with photographic field guides (inconsistency in lighting, color, framing, and pose) through the power of digital image manipulation. Flipping through Mammals one can see that this book is different from its predecessors and features several new design elements. The overall design is more open and pleasing to the eye. An obvious difference is the use of images showing mammals in habitat-grizzly bears catching salmon in a stream, a raft of otters, a wolf pack. The Birds and Butterflies guides showed species silhouetted or vingnietted out of the full images, with habitat and background removed. The colored page backgrounds of the Birds guide are gone in favor of lighter shades of off-white or light green. The marine mammals section displays the images in soft-edged ovals reminiscent of a scope-view of the animal. This section's photographs show the partial views we commonly get of marine mammals-just the head or just the front half of the creature. To complement these images, Kaufman has created small paintings showing the entire animal.

Another new design feature is the use of introductory text for each grouping of mammals describing some of the important facets of the group's natural history. This text clarifies the similarities and differences among the related mammal species and helps the reader to follow the distinctions among the 15 categories into which the authors divide North America's 450 mammal species.

As in the previous two guides, each species account appears opposite its photograph-and some accounts are given an entire page and multiple images. The descriptive text for each species is accompanied by a range map and, where appropriate, a diagram of the mammal's footprint or track is shown. Color-coded page flags make flipping to the right section of the guide very easy and the flex-bind covers offer field-worthy durability.

The Kaufman Focus Guides series may not appeal to those who prefer illustrations and not photographs in their field guides. But I think that's a mistake. Kaufman and company have raised the photo field guide to a new level. Mammals is a fascinating book, an excellent resource, and perhaps the finest photographic field guide ever produced

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Kaufman Focus Guide: Mammals of North America by Nora Bowers, Rick Bowers, and Kenn Kaufman.

Butterflies in the Backyard by Scott Shalaway.