Equal parts nature guide, adventure story, and coffee table book!   People are captivated by wild animals—by their strength and their size and by the things they do to stay alive. In  Wildlife Spectacles  zoologist Vladimir Dinets dives deep into this wonder, allowing curious readers to discover just how spectacular wild animals can be. In the rich, fully illustrated pages you’ll discover the migration of gray whales along the Pacific coast, the dancing alligators of the Everglades, the synchronized blinking of fireflies near Tennessee, the swarms of feeding bats over the Mississippi River, the blue-glowing scorpions of the Southwest desert, hundreds of wintering tundra swans in New Jersey, and much more. “With inspired passion, Vladimir Dinets introduces us to diverse wildlife spectacles, the natural history that drives them, and a checklist of amazing experiences—many of which are closer to home than you might think.” —Mark Elbroch, lead scientist of  Pumas with Panthera,  coauthor of Peterson Reference Guide to the Behavior of North American Mammals   “Master zoologist Dinets takes us on an astonishing journey, as luminous images and clear prose teach us essential ecology lessons.” —Dr. Cristina Eisenberg, chief scientist of  Earthwatch Institute , author of The Carnivore Way: Coexisting with and Conserving North America’s Predators “ Wildlife Spectacles is captivating and entrancing in both its information on a multitude of species and the full-color photographs throughout. Their stunning beauty is as much a reason to read this book as the text is.” — Shelf Awareness “This is a lovely book by an experienced behavioral ecologist and talented (and patient) photographer. It is a nice present for one interested in natural history. Particularly useful are the site directions, where one can encounter many of the described spectacles. The reviewer loved this aspect, and is currently making travel plans.” — Choice  “The animal lover on your list will howl with glee when she opens Wildlife Spectacles by Vladimir Dinets.” — The Marco Eagle “This book is all about wildlife and its behavior: migration, mating, parenting and more. Bonus: pictures!” — Oklahoman “A beautiful coffee table book for animal lovers.” — Daily Journal What Do Wild Animals Do When We’re Not Looking? Explore the secret lives of North America’s wild creatures with expeditioner-zoologist Vladimir Dinets—no binoculars needed! Through rare images and vivid descriptions, get to know migrating tarantulas, dancing alligators, and blue-glowing scorpions. Dinets reveals the whys and hows of wildlife behavior, and shares the best locations for real-world sightings.   Vladimir Dinets was born in Russia and immigrated to the United States as a young man. He obtained his PhD in zoology from the University of Miami in 2011, with a focus on animal behavior. He has traveled and photographed extensively all over North America for 17 years. He is the author of  Dragon Songs  and the  Peterson Guide to Finding Mammals in North America . Introduction Wild animals are beautiful. You can enjoy watching them even when they don’t do anything special. But they can also do amazing things: travel halfway around the globe, stage impressive light and sound shows, use all kinds of clever tricks, and perform unbelievable athletic feats. If you know what to look for and manage to be in the right place at the right time, you can have an experience you will not forget as long as you live. Being a zoologist, I’ve spent much of my life finding and observing animals in their natural habitats, but I still can’t get used to the scale and grandeur of wildlife spectacles—some of them happening at people’s doorsteps, in urban parks, and on popular beaches (seeing others, of course, requires some wilderness travel). And although I’ve seen almost all the events described here, some many times, I’ll never get tired of watching them. Many people who live in North America don’t realize or appreciate just how lucky they are to have so much wildlife around. Of course, North America has seen its share of horrible abuses of the environment, and there are still powerful political forces bent on sacrificing every last living thing to so-called business interests, which is a politically correct euphemism for greed. But thanks to decades of hard work by dedicated environmentalists, many parts of the continent have been beautifully preserved or restored, and wildlife here is more abundant and easy to see than almost anywhere in the world. You don’t have to pay exorbitantly for an obligatory guided jeep ride, as in many African or Indian national parks; you can easily avoid the crowds that are almost inescapable in much of Europe and China; it doesn’t take multiple days to reach natural habitats as it does in Indonesia, Madagascar, and much of Latin America; you don’t see silent forests where all wildlife has been hunted out as you would in Southeast Asia and Russ