Wild Cats [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION When we hear the words "wild cats, " our minds fill with images of exotic beasts in faraway places, A pride of lions sprawled in the dusty heat of the African plains. A tiger rippling through the damp green shade of a tropical rainforest. But there are other wild cats that live much closer to home and that, surprisingly, are not so widely known. This book offers an intimate look at three of our feline neighbours—the lynx, the bobcat and the mountain lion. If you put a house cat in a box and tell it to stay put, you can be reasonably sure that it will leap out within two minutes. Lynx, bobcats and mountain lions are, if anything, less biddable. They even resist being put into intellectual boxes, such as classification systems. Taxonomists still haven't been able to determine if there are one or three species of lynx, or if lynx and bobcats belong to the same genus as mountain lions or ought to have their own grouping. Nor are the cats easier to pin down by geography. Although the ranges of the three species overlap in North America, lynx and mountain lions spill off the continent in different directions — lynx across Eurasia and mountain lions to the tip of South America. For the sake of simplicity, this bookfocusses on the cats of North America, Europe and Asia, in the North Temperate Zone More specifically, it concentrates on the temperate forest, a wide belt of woodlands that arises first as stunted Mountain lion. Denver Bryan Previous page: Lynx. Erwin & Peggy Bauer