The New Neotropical Companion
by John KricherPrinceton University Press, 2017How best to update a classic?The classic in question this time is the “little green book” from 1989, the first edition of Joh Kricher's much-beloved A Neotropical Companion, a bright, small handbook full of helpful field-identification information for the myriad creatures that whoop and crawl and slither and fly and climb and dig and glide and swim through the New World tropics. The “little green book” was only sparsely illustrated, and even then only with black-and-white drawings, which were long on charm if unavoidably short on specifics. But it was handy, and battered, much-consulted copies of it found their way into rucksacks and poncho pockets all over South America.Kricher kept trekking through those forests and jungles and swamps and snowfields himself, as did other scientists and field experts, and it therefore wasn't long before the Little Green Book began to look a bit parochial. It was updated and greatly enlarged in 1997, and the new Neotropical Companion was very much more Neotropical … but at the cost of being very much less companionable – it was a book, a proper bound thing with a dust jacket and swarms of bright, detailed photos of the innumerable kinds of animals that inhabit the Bahamas, the Greater and Lesser Antilles, the West Indies, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, and everywhere in between.That profusion is the key to the tropics, as Kricher points out. “Life-forms are not randomly distributed on Earth,” he writes. “Tropical terrestrial ecosystems occupy only about 7% of Earth's surface but are believed to hold more than 50% of the world's terrestrial plant and animal species.” Capturing all of that mind-boggling variety in a single volume is of course impossible (the tropics host 350 species of hummingbird alone), but the new Neotropical Companion clearly wanted to come a little closer to doing it … even at the cost of being much less portable for people hiking through the wilderness and needing a guidebook at the ready when something colorful flashes across the middle distance.There's now an even bigger, more profusely illustrated Neotropical Companion out from Princeton University Press, and the wonder of that moment, the moment when something colorful flashes into view, is still at the heart of the book. In all his years of clambering through the tropics, Kricher himself has clearly never lost that wonder:
Seeing a Jaguar (Panthera onca) for the first time, in its element, its home, its piece of rain forest, is worth any long bumpy dusty ride, a few annoying mosquitos, muddy boots, an airport delay, or any other minor inconvenience typical of modern travel. Observing a real live Jaguar in the wild provides a remarkable connectivity with Earth's natural world that is simply unrivaled. You have really seen something special. And there is so much more.
Readers get immense helpings of that “so much more” in these pages – hundreds of sharp, clear photos of the denizens of the neotropics, all accompanied by Kricher's informative, energetic narration. Our author has always maintained that it's every bit as legitimate to use the Neotropical Companion as an armchair reference long after the sweaty, buggy part of the adventure is over (or entirely in place of the adventure), and that's just as well when it comes to this new edition, since it's scarcely the kind of thing that travels well. It's very sturdily made, but it's also the largest and heaviest Companion yet, much more a research volume than a take-along quick reference guide. Kricher is the real companion in these pages, always right there urging his readers to go out into the wilds and really appreciate what they're seeing:
When you first experience being in rain forest you are sure to be impressed by the density of the plant growth. Everything appears so lush, so dense, so green. But perambulate slowly through the forest, and look around carefully. Take in the full picture, from ground level to canopy. As you move from one place to another, you will see that the forest is not uniform in structure. There are scattered fallen branches and toppled trees that have opened the canopy, allowing sunlight to illuminate part of the forest floor. Youthful, riotous plant growth typifies such openings. Whole sections of forest may be composed of denser and smaller trees. Tropical forests are patchy, not uniform.
No matter how its readers end up using it, a new Neotropical Companion is a cause for celebration – and if some enterprising publisher were to take the chance of reprinting that first Little Green Book, well, that would be more celebration.
