Abstract
THE late Charles Sheldon was a great hunter, and this posthumous work describes the last of his hunting trips, amongst the snows of Denali or Mt. M'Kinley in Alaska. But Sheldon was also a sound observer of Nature, and while the sportsman will be thrilled by his descriptions of difficult stalks after bighorn, moose, and reindeer, the naturalist turns, with some relief, from the tales and pictures of slaughter, to his comments upon the lives of these and other wild animals. Colour protection attracted his attention: snowy owls hunting for mice in the snow were inconspicuous, and motionless ptarmigan were invisible; the markings and coloration of the lynx blended with the rocks; but the colour of the moose rather revealed than concealed it, and the white bighorns were sometimes visible three or four miles away. A sudden plague of field mice and lemmings sprang up in 1907, where none had been seen before; marsh-hawks increased in numbers, and by May of the following year mice were scarce again. There are many such notes scattered throughout the text, but the book is primarily a hunter's account of the pursuit of big game and the habits which had to be explored to make the pursuit fruitful.
The Wilderness of Denali: Explorations of a Hunter-Naturalist in Northern Alaska.
Charles
Sheldon
. Pp. xxv + 412 + 63 plates. (New York and London: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1930.) 21s. net.
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The Wilderness of Denali: Explorations of a Hunter-Naturalist in Northern Alaska . Nature 126, 237 (1930). https://doi.org/10.1038/126237c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/126237c0