From avoiding predators to navigating through the jungle without a compass, this innovative guide provides kids with the vital tools one would need if lost in the Amazon. Offering practical survival techniques based on real stories, children will learn lessons that can be adapted to almost any outdoor situation, such as making fire, deciphering animal tracks, and using the natural world for all to create necessary supplies. Opening with an informative section on the region and its people, this essential resource combines history and science in a fun and engaging way. Facts and sidebars on the local creatures and plants are interspersed along with 15 activities for the home or classroom—from making a fishing spear to determining how much water is needed to stay healthy.
From avoiding predators to navigating through the jungle without a compass, this innovative guide provides kids with the vital tools one would need if lost in the Amazon. Offering practical survival techniques based on real stories, children will learn lessons that can be adapted to almost any outdoor situation, such as making fire, deciphering animal tracks, and using the natural world for all to create necessary supplies. Opening with an informative section on the region and its people, this essential resource combines history and science in a fun and engaging way. Facts and sidebars on the local creatures and plants are interspersed along with 15 activities for the home or classroom—from making a fishing spear to determining how much water is needed to stay healthy.
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
"Rainforests occupy a special place in the imagination. Literary, historical and cinematic depictions range from a ghastly Green Hell to an idyllic Garden of Eden. In terms of fiction, they fired the already fervent imaginations of storytellers as diverse as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Rudyard Kipling and even George Lucas and Steven Spielberg in whose books and films they are inhabited by dinosaurs, trod by Indiana Jones, prowled by Mowgli the Jungle Boy and swung through by Tarzan of the Apes. But rainforest fact is no less fascinating than rainforest fiction. Brimming with mystery and intrigue, these forests still harbor lost cities, uncontacted tribes, ancient shamans, and powerful plants than can kill - and cure. The rainforest bestiary extends far beyond the requisite lions, tigers and bears. Flying foxes and winged lizards, arboreal anteaters, rainforest giraffes, cross-dressing spiders that disguise themselves as ants and bats the size of a bumblebees all flourish in these most fabulous of forests along with other zoological denizens that are equally bizarre and spectacular. And no scientist immersed in these ecosystems believes that all the wonders have been found or revealed. Tropical rainforests merit their moniker. They flourish in the tropics - the more than 3000 mile-wide equatorial band between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. And these forests are hot, humid and wet, receiving in the Amazon, on average from 60 to 120 inches of rain per year - as compared to a mere 25 inches in London or 45 inches in Manhattan. However, several sites in the rainforests of northeastern India, of west Africa and western Colombia are drenched by over 400 inches of precipitation per annum. To a large degree, rainfall in the tropics is determined by the so-called "Intertropical Convergence Zone" (ICZ), a band of clouds around the equator created by the meeting of the northeast and southeast trade winds. Also referred to as the "Monsoon Trough," and known to - and dreaded by - sailors over the centuries as the "Doldrums," since the extended periods of calm that sometimes manifested there could strand a sailing vessel for weeks. The constant cloud cover due to the ICZ, the ferocious heat, and the abundant rainfall combine to produce high humidity, sometimes close to 95 per cent in the Amazon, a challenge for visitors unused to such torpor. According to Rhett Butler of Mongabay: "Each canopy tree transpires 200 gallons of water annually, translating roughly into 20,000 gallons transpired into the atmosphere for every acre of canopy trees. Large rainforests (and their humidity) contribute to the formation of rain clouds, and generate as much as 75 per cent of their own rain and are therefore responsible for creating as much as 50 per cent of their own precipitation.""--
In this exciting adventure mixed with amazing scientific study, a young, exuberant explorer and geoscientist journeys deep into the Amazon—where rivers boil and legends come to life. When Andrés Ruzo was just a small boy in Peru, his grandfather told him the story of a mysterious legend: There is a river, deep in the Amazon, which boils as if a fire burns below it. Twelve years later, Ruzo—now a geoscientist—hears his aunt mention that she herself had visited this strange river. Determined to discover if the boiling river is real, Ruzo sets out on a journey deep into the Amazon. What he finds astounds him: In this long, wide, and winding river, the waters run so hot that locals brew tea in them; small animals that fall in are instantly cooked. As he studies the river, Ruzo faces challenges more complex than he had ever imaged. The Boiling River follows this young explorer as he navigates a tangle of competing interests—local shamans, illegal cattle farmers and loggers, and oil companies. This true account reads like a modern-day adventure, complete with extraordinary characters, captivating plot twists, and jaw-dropping details—including stunning photographs and a never-before-published account about this incredible natural wonder. Ultimately, though, The Boiling River is about a man trying to understand the moral obligation that comes with scientific discovery —to protect a sacred site from misuse, neglect, and even from his own discovery.
From the acclaimed author of Conquistador comes this thrilling account of one of history’s greatest adventures of discovery. With cinematic immediacy and meticulous attention to historical detail, here is the true story of a legendary sixteenth-century explorer and his death-defying navigation of the Amazon—river of darkness, pathway to gold. In 1541, the brutal conquistador Gonzalo Pizarro and his well-born lieutenant Francisco Orellana set off from Quito in search of La Canela, South America’s rumored Land of Cinnamon, and the fabled El Dorado, “the golden man.” Driving an enormous retinue of mercenaries, enslaved natives, horses, hunting dogs, and other animals across the Andes, they watched their proud expedition begin to disintegrate even before they descended into the nightmarish jungle, following the course of a powerful river. Soon hopelessly lost in the swampy labyrinth, their numbers diminishing daily through disease, starvation, and Indian attacks, Pizarro and Orellana made a fateful decision to separate. While Pizarro eventually returned home barefoot and in rags, Orellana and fifty-seven men, in a few fragile craft, continued downriver into the unknown reaches of the mighty Amazon, serenaded by native war drums and the eerie cries of exotic predators. Theirs would be the greater glory. Interweaving eyewitness accounts of the quest with newly uncovered details, Buddy Levy reconstructs the seminal journey that has electrified adventurers ever since, as Orellana became the first European to navigate and explore the entire length of the world’s largest river. Levy gives a long-overdue account of the native populations—some peaceful and welcoming, offering sustenance and life-saving guidance, others ferociously hostile, subjecting the invaders to gauntlets of unremitting attack and intimations of terrifying rituals. And here is the Amazon itself, a powerful presence whose every twist and turn held the promise of new wonders both natural and man-made, as well as the ever-present risk of death—a river that would hold Orellana in its irresistible embrace to the end of his life. Overflowing with violence and beauty, nobility and tragedy, River of Darkness is both riveting history and a breathtaking adventure that will sweep readers along on an epic voyage unlike any other.
