John A. Byers is Professor of Zoology at the University of Idaho.
Byers at all times writes with lucidity and warmth for the animal
he has spent literally decades studying… Byers has called our
attention to an often overlooked corner of creation: the shortgrass
prairie. He urges us—through the strength of his prose and the
sincerity of his passion—to conserve that very thing whose absence
will be our confounding.
*Bloomsbury Review*
A Year in the Life of Pronghorn is natural history at its best, a
first-person narrative by zoology professor John A. Byers, told
with the grace and agility that have made these four-legged Shelby
Cobras famous.
*Dallas Morning News*
Although a biologist who is obsessed with his subject could spout
facts and numbers for hours, Byers suppresses neither his highly
poetic sensibility nor his boundless joy in the marvels of life.
The result is a work of literature, as when he describes the song
of meadowlarks as ‘a low flood of burbling that spreads across the
prairie like the sheet of light that fireflies make at grass tops
after a thunderstorm.’ But readers also gain a tremendous sense of
pronghorns’ lives, down to the tiniest details of how fawns
survive.
*Los Angeles Times*
This is a swift, short take on a fascinating animal.
*National Geographic Adventure*
Byers, professor of zoology at the University of Idaho, has spent
20 years closely observing pronghorn on the National Bison Range in
Montana. His account of the animal’s ways is thorough and
fascinating.
*Scientific American*
This is a book of natural history, rather than an ethological study
of a single species, and it brings to mind Frank Fraser Darling’s
classic study of animal behaviour, A Herd of Red Deer, first
published in 1937. In similar style, Byers writes simply and with
sensitivity about the ways of life of the pronghorn, and he also
brings in his observations and thoughts about the landscape of the
prairie and its other inhabitants, from bison to grasshoppers.
*Times Literary Supplement*
In Built for Speed, zoologist John A. Byers distills 20 years of
experience observing the fastest mammal in North America… Most
affectingly, the book captures the deep satisfaction Byers finds in
his work.
*American Scientist*
John A. Byers is a field biologist who has spent almost a quarter
of a century chasing pronghorn antelopes in Montana’s National
Bison Range. Byers observes his subjects with such patience that he
can recognize individual faces the way most people recognize
friends and family. He’s read John James Audubon and John Muir,
and, as he proves with stirring accounts of his experiences in
big-sky country, he can spin a phrase with a skill worthy of those
master wordsmiths.
*Natural History*
Occasionally crossing into the lyrical, Byers successfully
negotiates the shaky ground where scientific credibility and
literary merit mingle with an attention to craft too often missing
from ecology-based writing… What Byers does particularly well
throughout the book is to tie the turning of the seasons and the
resultant changes on the rhythms of pronghorn activity to elements
of the natural world rather than calendrical time… He illuminates
the flow and tragic drama of pronghorn life in a manner that could
only come from someone close to the creatures, and he captures the
essence of the animal without becoming sentimental or
anthropomorphic—no small feat.
*Western American Literature*
Byers, a biologist, has studied pronghorns on a refuge in western
in Montana for more than 20 years, and this firsthand account of
fieldwork in the high-plains grasslands evokes the wonder and
beauty of the region as well as the mechanics of how to study such
an alert and speedy animal.
*Booklist*
After describing the basic anatomy of pronghorn, [Byers] details
the social system of adult females and their offspring, the feeding
and playing behavior of fawns, the behavior of males before and
during the rut, and the behavior of males and females after the rut
as they prepare for the long winter on the prairie. Throughout,
Byers also includes his personal observations of other species that
are associated with this region, including snipe, meadowlarks,
bison, and elk. With its vivid descriptions of the prairie and the
animals that inhabit it, this book is an entertaining read for all
audiences.
*Choice*
Listen to this serenade for American wild life sung by a biologist
who has spend an unimaginable amount of time following his favorite
animal, the pronghorn. With great love and humor, John Byers
describes the ins and outs of this unassuming but remarkable
animal’s life while effortlessly educating us about ecology and
evolution.
*Frans de Waal, author of The Ape and the Sushi Master*
Readers of this book will be transported by its engaging prose into
three very different worlds. First, they will gain an appreciation
for what fieldwork on large mammals is really like. Second, they
will see how there is no substitute for long-term research on
marked individuals to gain knowledge on large mammal ecology.
Thirdly, they will see a prehistoric world where cheetahs chase
pronghorns over the North American Plains, and will be invited to
think about how those distant events may affect the biology of
modern-day pronghorn.
*Marco Festa-Bianchet, Professor of Ecology, Université de
Sherbrooke*
John Byers’s Built for Speed is the best modern natural history I
know. His profound sense of place, welded to his tenacious
observations of the behavior of long-lived individuals, and his
knowledge of deep time have exposed the ghosts of predators past on
pronghorn. Added pleasure comes from Byers’s prose, which is
sometimes as thrilling and amusing as watching pronghorn run. You
won’t find a more passionate exegesis of what it is to be a modern
animal behaviorist anywhere.
*Patricia Adair Gowaty, Professor of Ecology, University of
Georgia*
John Byers’s beautifully written account of his twenty-year study
of pronghorn antelope was sheer pleasure to read. With the eye and
empathy of the keenest naturalist, and the voice of a poet, Byers
evokes the sights and sounds of the western prairie so vividly that
I felt as if I was there in Montana beside him. This splendid book
certainly made me want to be.
*Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, author of The Woman That Never Evolved*
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