Be suspicious when someone tells you that size doesn’t matter. On the contrary, when it comes to field guides, for example, the size of the book is a determining factor toward how well it will serve the customer. For example there are several beautiful coffee table books whose subject matter is the wildlife of Costa Rica. But I wouldn’t want to treat that book like a field guide, put it in my backpack and go into the jungle in search of its subject matter. Likewise, there are pocket guides that provide concise snapshots of the most common species of wildlife in Costa Rica, concise being the operative word. Pocket guides are handy but are limited and compact in their information as well.

Did you know that frogs don’t drink water? It’s true: instead of lapping it up with their tongues in the conventional sense like a dog or a cat, frogs absorb water through their skin. I learned this bit of interesting information, and a lot more, when I recently read Adrian Forsyth’s new book, “Rainforests – Costa Rica and Beyond”. Forsyth, and award winning author and biologist, is definitely at home in the rainforest, drawing on more than forty years of experience as reference to present this publication. And it is some impressive experience that Adrian brings to the table: Vice President of the Blue Moon Fund, Director of Biodiversity Science for the Andean/Amazon Foundation, a PhD from Harvard in tropical ecology, Vice President of Conservation International, a research associate at the Smithsonian Institute, and the list goes on from there. Forsyth is also the author of at least five books ensconced in ecology, including the eye-catching title, “The Natural History of Sex”.