In 1946, Edmund Jaeger was poking around a canyon in the Chuckwalla Mountains when he found a poorwill wedged in a rock crevice, cold and unresponsive, and it stayed that way for weeks. Nobody thought birds could hibernate. He went back winter after winter, banded the bird, took its temperature, and proved it, which is still the only bird known to do it. He taught at Riverside City College and spent sixty years walking the California desert, and this book, a 1961 expansion of an earlier one, is the accumulated result. Kangaroo rats that never drink. Chuckwallas wedging into cracks and inflating. Roadrunners, ground squirrels, sidewinders, the desert tortoise. It’s essays rather than a field guide, written plainly, by a man who watched these animals longer than most people watch anything.