Reptiles and Amphibians of the Amazon: An Ecotourist's Guide

The book is really well done. It is a fantastic guide to the Amazon Region for amphibians and reptiles of the region. I wish the book had been better shipped. It was tossed in a bag and banged around in shipping. It didn't do the book any good. I won't buy another book through them.

As I was recently planning a trip to Ecuador's rainforest, I was shocked to see that very few books on the identification ofreptiles and amphibians exists. Since this was the only book I was able to find, I bought it despite the negative criticism it received on amazon.com. I have to say I didn't regret it at all!This book is a great help in identifying reptiles and amphibians of the amazon rainforest. Of course not allspecies that can be found are listed. Personally, I believe that they only included species that they have found themselves.Thus, even species that are rather common can be missing. However, I appreciate that they only use first-hand information.The pictures they use are in most of the cases great. Of course there are exceptions (e.g. the Sanguine poison frog's picture is way too small or some pictures show the animals head). However, in most cases even color variations, gender differences or the underside of the animals are displayed.The texts describing the appearance of the animals are also great. However, some texts could just be left out, such as the frog sound descriptions. Personally, I could not make use of these descriptions. Natural language is just not good for that.Whether some species identifications are wrong, as some of my fellow critics have said, I cannot judge. To me, however,no error jumped out. The only thing being that the common name 'Fer-de-Lance' was assigned to the wrong lancehead. But that's no big deal.Improvements:The pictures of the animals are all clustered in the middle of the book. While this is great for quickly looking at all pictures toidentify an animal, I would have preferred one page/animal including the picture. That way one could have gotten an overview of all species and would still have been able to read whether the animal occured in the area of the sigthing.Which brings me to my second point for improvement: the habitat description. The book describes the range a species lives inas e.g. the 'Northern amazon basin'. I really would have liked some rough maps of the amazon showing where the animal can occur.Overall, the book is good for identification and one of the few that covers reptiles and amphibians of the amazon.

The product is a good size for traveling. There are only 275 photos on the plates but they are very well done. The descriptions of the families and species are great. Size, Identification, Reproduction, Habitat and Range and Similar species are all descried.I would say that this book is WELL worth the money. It is one of the only guides on reptiles and amphibians of South America that I could find in Canada.

One of the few popular manual there is on this subject. However I would have liked some kind of systematic key or oversight matrix.

OK.