Raymond Cowles grew up in South Africa, studied at UCLA, and more or less invented the study of how cold-blooded animals manage their own body heat — the reason we know a lizard moves between sun and shade to hold its temperature. The book was unfinished when he died and completed by California naturalist Elna Bakker and published in 1977. It’s field notes, mostly: rattlesnakes and sidewinders, horned lizards squirting blood, the rosy boa, black widows, Colorado River toads, condors, the Imperial Valley, camps and canyons and what happens after a desert storm. He keeps returning to the one thing he noticed late — that desert animals need open ground and space is a requirement, not a backdrop.
Desert Journal