Naturalist's Field Guide to Bermuda
Written by Dr. Martin Thomas and recently published, this field guide to Bermuda focuses on the common and important wildlife, plantations and geology of the island. So, who is this meant for? If you walk around in the island looking for birds, animals, plants, vegetation, and want to identify and know about them, this is a handy book to carry along.
Dr. Thomas had already written 12 books on Bermuda. His previous one was 'A Natural History of Bermuda'. This was published 10 years back. Dr. Thomas is an ecologist and an author from Canada. In order to research the ecology of Bermuda that formed the basis of his current book 'Naturalist's Field Guide to Bermuda', he brought in several university students from Canada. It took him three years to produce this guidebook.
The author chose to write this book because there was a big gap in the market. Although there have field guides available, they are mostly focussed on a group of animals or plants. For example, there are field guides only on birds, but there are no such guides on plants and spiders together, or anything like that.
So his approach is to get all the animals and plants of Bermuda's ecosystem and discuss about them in a single book and accompanied by lots of pictures. The guide is divided up by habitat, such as common plants and animals or grass and roadsides.
75% of the pictures in the book are original and taken by the author himself. There were some difficult photos like that of the Ghost Crabs, for which he had to take professional help.
In the guide, Dr. Thomas tried to highlight certain plants and animals of Bermuda that are in trouble. He said "A lot of the things that need conditions that were here in the old Bermuda are in decline, because of all the building and destruction of natural habitat."
"Ten years ago, Sea Lavender was common," he said. "You could find it in three or four places. Now it is in one place". You can get information about this plant in the ponds, swamps and marshes section of the book.
The book is published by the Bermuda Zoological Society and is available for $24.95 at the Bermuda Aquarium, Museum & Zoo Gift Shop.
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