Quetzals

An introduction to the habitat, physical characteristics, behavior, and life cycle of quetzals, beautiful birds that live in the rain forests of Central America and South America.

The quetzal is the national bird of Guatemala and lends its name to that country's currency. In fact, the quetzal has long been revered for its beautiful feathers. In ancient times, the Mayan people used quetzal feathers as money. Your fascinated readers will find out more about this resplendent bird and some of its neighbors, such as the toucan and the macaw.

Beautifully illustrated with color plates and line drawings, this comprehensive review of trogons and quetzals -- the first to be published in more than 150 years -- covers all thirty-nine extant species. This up-to-date survey will serve as a valuable reference for ornithologists, conservationists, aviculturalists, and birdwatchers worldwide.

A reference encyclopedia providing information on endangered wildlife and plants throughout the world.

In The Chicken and the Quetzal Paul Kockelman theorizes the creation, measurement, and capture of value by recounting the cultural history of a village in Guatemala's highland cloud forests and its relation to conservation movements and ecotourism. In 1990 a group of German ecologists founded an NGO to help preserve the habitat of the resplendent quetzal—the strikingly beautiful national bird of Guatemala—near the village of Chicacnab. The ecotourism project they established in Chicacnab was meant to provide new sources of income for its residents so they would abandon farming methods that destroyed quetzal habitat. The pressure on villagers to change their practices created new values and forced negotiations between indigenous worldviews and the conservationists' goals. Kockelman uses this story to offer a sweeping theoretical framework for understanding the entanglement of values as they are interpreted and travel across different and often incommensurate ontological worlds. His theorizations apply widely to studies of the production of value, the changing ways people make value portable, and value's relationship to ontology, affect, and selfhood.

The continuing story of the residents of the planet Donovan as survival becomes more of a struggle.

The Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve has captured the attention of biologists, conservationists and ecologists and has been the setting for extensive investigation over the past 30 years. This provides information on this ecosystem and the biota.

A collection of activities designed to teach such critical science skills as observing, predicting, ordering, exploring, sorting, and creative thinking.

Annotation "Seven Names for the Bellbird showcases the deep-rooted local traditions of bird appreciation and holds them up as a model for sound management of the environment. Through his recounting of local lore, author Mark Bonta makes the interaction between culture and avifauna in Latin America a key to better understanding the practice of biodiversity protection. He offers a significant contribution to the scarce anthropological and geographical literature on human-environment relationships in Central America and also provides wonderful stories of native birds and their human observers." "Bonta uses the concept of 'conservation geography' - the study of human beings and their landscapes, with natural resource conservation in the forefront - to advance his argument. He describes many cases in which local individuals and their traditional knowledge of birds contribute to a de facto variety of bird conservation that precedes or parallels 'official' bird protection efforts." "This book is not offered as 'proof' that all birds have happy futures in the Neotropics. Bonta recognizes the ravages of both human pressures and natural disasters on the birds and forests. But he shows that in many instances, birds are safe and even thrive in the presence of local people, who 'celebrate them just as often as they persecute them.'"--BOOK JACKET. Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved.