Alligators

During the past nine years, photographer Martha Strawn has taken more than 40,000 photographs of the alligator - in freshwater marshes and swamps, lakes and ponds, rivers, bayous, brackish estuaries, and saltwater coastal marshes and backwaters, from Texas to North Carolina. Alligators, Prehistoric Presence in the American Landscape offers a selection of 151 of Strawn's photographs in a unique book that combines art, science, history, folklore, land ethics, and literature to tell the story of America's southern landscape and one of its most evocative creatures. Strawn covers such topics as mating and reproduction, hunting, loss of habitat, resource management, and the commercial mean and skin industries. Three personal essays bring home the relationship between alligators and humans: "Memories of Gator Hunts," by alligator hunter LeRoy Overstreet; "Living by the Wetlands," by Jane Gibson, a conservation anthropologist; and "Living with Alligators," by ecologist J. Whitfield Gibbons. These stories give voice to the people - hunters, alligator farmers, meat and skin processors, scientists, and wildlife managers - who spend their days and nights with this noble member of the order Crocodilia.