In 1953, English journalist Graham Peters is sent to Nepal to cover the attempt to conquer Mt Everest. Kathmandu is full of foreigners, including two textile merchants, who upon reading of the successful ascent – and the New Zealander who had “knocked the bastard off” – do some exploring of their own. Unfamiliar with the area, they misread their map and get lost. Stumbling through a valley, they find fragments of wreckage from a crashed plane, a German cargo plane. In hospital they are visited by Peters, who sees their hapless story as a good background piece for his Mt Everest article. During the interview, they describe the wreckage they had found. The article is published around the world, and is of interest to a lot of people, none more so than the German SS officer who led a Tibetan exploration team in 1938. Now living in Argentina, Kraus (aka Richard Smyth) sees this as his opportunity to regain the plundered treasure of Nazi gold that was lost on that fateful flight. Back in England, Peters researches why a German plane may have crashed in Nepal, and begins to uncover the truth. He returns to Nepal to find the wreckage, to right the wrongs of the past, and to expose Nazi atrocities perpetrated in Tibet just prior to WWII.

Many field ornithologists record where and when they identify species of birds, especially when they encounter a species out of its normal range or for the first time. Until now, however, a checklist based on the Sibley-Ahlquist-Monroe classification has not been available. In this book, Burt L. Monroe, Jr., and Charles G. Sibley provide a list of 9,702 living avian species based on their 1990 book Distribution and Taxonomy of Birds of the World and its 1993 Supplement.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1863.

Horses Like Lightningoffers an intimate portrait of an extraordinary culture and tells how one woman found her place in it.

Results of regular monitoring of the species diversity and structure of plant communities is used by conservation biologists to help understand impacts of perturbations caused by humans and other environmental factors on ecosystems worldwide. Changes in plant communities can, for example, be a reflection of increased levels of pollution, a response to long-term climate change, or the result of shifts in land-use practices by the human population. This book presents a series of essays on the application of plant biodiversity monitoring and assessment to help prevent species extinction, ecosystem collapse, and solve problems in biodiversity conservation. It has been written by a large international team of researchers and uses case studies and examples from all over the world, and from a broad range of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. The book is aimed at any graduate students and researchers with a strong interest in plant biodiversity monitoring and assessment, plant community ecology, biodiversity conservation, and the environmental impacts of human activities on ecosystems.