Among the most widespread and abundant of the world's larger mammals, deer have been a source of endless fascination for humans beings. Yet over the centuries we have hunted them for sport and for their meat, hides, and antlers, and pursued them as destructive pests.In this richly informative and engagingly written book, Rory Putnam captures the astonishing diversity in habitat, diet, social organization, and behavior of the world's 40 species of deer, and tells what is known about their biology and natural history. Rather than simply assembling species-by-species data, he compares and...

Everyone is familiar with the big cats the lion, tiger, leopard, and jaguar members of the genus Panthera. The smaller cats members of the genus Felis are less familiar. This absorbing book, considered "a comprehensive survey" by David Quammen, writing in the New York Times Book Review, presents what is known about the thirty-seven or so species of the world's cats, including abundant information on the much-neglected smaller members of the cat family."Dr. Kitchener . . . has made a readable, up-to-date synthesis of what we know about cats, his account always strengthened by the comparative...