Wild India

Published in association with the World Wide Fund for Nature, "Wild India" is a valuable current record of the subcontinent's wild places and wilderness areas. Guy Mountfort, an authority on all aspects of species preservation, provides a discerning account of the ecological and human history of the region, focusing on present-day pressures on India's irreplaceable natural heritage. Gerald Cubitt's superb 400 full-color photographs are informatively captioned and divided into sections on the Himalayas, the Indo-Gangetic Plain, and the Deccan."Wild India" surveys the great diversity of plant and animal life from the remote Karakoram range in Ladakh to the rainforests of the southwestern ghats, from the deserts of the far west of Rajasthan to the jungles and swamps of Assam and Manipur.

Here, among numerous other species, are the magnificent Kashmir stag and the shy musk deer, the rare lion-tailed macaque and the Nilgiri tahr, and the Asiatic lion -- in its last bastion in the Gir forest -- along with the golden langur, the one-horned rhinoceros, and herds of elephant and buffalo.Guy Mountfort has helped to create national parks and wildlife reserves in India, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh. As a founder of the World Wide Fund for Nature, he led the international campaign to save the tiger from extinction. Gerald Cubitt, one of the world's leading natural history photographers, has provided all of the photographs for "Wild India," as he did for the companion volume, "Wild Malaysia."