Title: The Redrock Canyon Explorer
First published: 1999
Description: Here's a fascinating fact/fiction book for all ages, about canyon life of the Southwest. Illustrated with more than 280 drawings, you will see this redrock canyon from the viewpoint of the wildlife as they go about their everyday lives.

Beginning with a coyote carrying home dinner to its family, you trot down the canyon trail, watched by a mother vulture keeping her eggs warm in a nearby cave. One of the eggs is hatching, and you watch as the chick emerges....

The illustrated story reads like good fiction, following the lives of the mammals, birds, insects, reptiles and plants and their closely interconnected lives in a desert canyon. You'll experience a flash flood through the eyes of a desert cottontail and drink at the canyon potholes with a mule deer. Feed your owl chicks in an Ancient Puebloan dwelling, and protect your spider eggs in an old cracked Anasazi cooking pot.

You'll experience what an ordinary day is like for forty-three different creatures, from mourning dove and canyon wren to bighorn sheep and mountain lion, as well as such oddities as spadefoot toad, collared lizard, kangaroo rat and yucca moth.

Illustrations show everything from tracks and skulls and animal behavior to petrified sand dunes and dinosaur footprints. You'll find maps and the geology of all the popular parks and monuments; hiking and camping advice; and an entertaining, low-impact Things-To-Do section. A table of contents and an extensive index make it quick and easy to look things up.
Subjects: Desert ecology, wildlife, juvenile fiction
Time periods: Southwest U.S.
LC classification: QH541.5.D4 B73 1999