Overview

'I thoroughly enjoyed reading about the animals that Fritz calls 'my people'. If gazelles could choose an advocate for themselves, they surely would select Fritz Walther. He knows those elegant animals better than anyone, and in this affectionate tribute he describes their behavior with charm, spirit, and insight' - George B. Schaller. When Fritz Walther was a young boy growing up in Dresden his grandfather took him to the zoo, where he immediately fell in love with gazelles and dreamed of going to Africa to study them. Now, almost thirty years after his field research, Walther gives us a memoir of his experiences - the challenges, problems, and romance of studying animals on the Serengeti at a time when it was still one of the great wild areas of the world. The first chapter gives us a detailed study of the mating behavior of Thomson's gazelles, focusing on the adventures of two exemplary tommy bucks, Short-Tail and Roman.The publisher defies any reader to escape from falling in love with these two animals and the man who is studying them. Other chapters recount Walther's experience with lions, the behavior of migratory herds, and the care of female antelopes for their young. This is a major treatment of the nature of predator-prey relations, and a fascinating narrative on a day in the life of a small group of Oryx antelopes led across the plain by their leader, named Mzee, or 'the old guy'. 'Between trees and bushes glimmering in the sunlight, Roman disappeared from my sight - the tommy buck to whom I owed so much insight into animal life and so many brilliant personal experiences, and to whom I, too, had apparently been something more than an inevitable evil'.'There is much sparkling life and much bitter dying on the African plains. But death does not govern life in the wild, though it is permanently present somewhere in the background and may show up at any time. I deeply felt that it is precisely the occurrence of life in the presence of death that distinguishes the nature of freedom in the wild, and, before falling asleep in my sleeping bag in my car, I sometimes tried to imagine which horror might capture our politicians and social philosophers who babble so drolly about 'freedom' if they were exposed to this freedom - the only one which deserves the name'.

Full Product Details

9780253363251

Table of Contents

Reviews

A leisurely, folksy account of Serengeti days spent communing with horned ungulates. During the mid-1960s and early 1970s - while teaching at the University of Missouri, Columbia, and then at Texas A&M - Walther spent a goodly amount of time in the Serengeti National Park in East Africa doing fieldwork in the then-new science of ethology (species-specific behavior in animals), studying gazelles in particular. This short volume is the fruit of those African experiences, written at a distance of 25 years. It's the kind of monograph Sherlock Holmes would approve for its wealth of fact and observation, yet it also makes comfortable fireside reading, with its reminiscences of a tourist-free savannah and its fogyish humor. Much of the book is given over to recording the daily life of gazelles: their territorial marking walks, grazings, snoozes in the sun, flirtations, copulations, clashes with neighboring bucks, more grazings and markings, another catnap - life in the slow lane. Walther unleashes a bit of hard science when he discusses mating rituals and flight distances, alpha male roles and mass migration patterns. With obvious pleasure, he cuts the mighty simba down a notch. I can unreservedly agree with only one of the laudatory tributes, he writes. The lion is yellow - more or less. Walther was a field man of the old school: He made his own maps; kept long, hard hours; fended, alone, for himself; and was not afraid of some modest anthropomorphism. (He still isn't, referring in the text to the gazelles as my people and giving them names.) The book's only lack is a glossary; it's hard to keep straight whether a dik-dik prefers sotting within sight of a mbuga...or maybe it was a kopje. Wonderfully rich and detailed, filled with vignettes, a lovely blend of science and memoir. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

FRITZ R. WALTHER is the author of Communication and Expression in Hoofed Mammals and numerous scientific papers. He has made many trips to Africa to study animal behavior, especially that of gazelles.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available