Year of the Pig is a personal account of one avid hunter's pursuit of wild pigs in eleven American states. Mark Hainds tied his mission to the Chinese calendar's Year of the Pig in 2007 and journeyed through longleaf forests, cypress swamps, and wiliwili forests in search of his prey. He used a range of weapons--black-powder rifle, bow and arrow, knife, and high-powered rifle--and various methods to stalk his quarry through titi, saw palmetto, privet hedge, and blue palms.
Introduced pig populations have wreaked havoc on ecosystems the world over. Non-native to the Western...

For nearly 200 million years, Earth has been occupied by reptiles--a lineage of terrestrial vertebrates that includes some, like birds, that have invaded the aerial environment, and others, like turtles, that have invaded aquatic environments. With thirty-nine known species, Alabama harbors more turtle species than any other state in the nation, and its Mobile River basin is the center of the world's greatest biodiversity in turtles, surpassing all other river systems around the globe, including the Amazon and the Nile. Turtles of Alabama documents that extraordinary wealth and...