Just one hundred and ten miles south of the Texas-Louisiana border, beneath the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, lie two coral reefs, together called the Flower Garden Banks. This coral community, the northernmost reef system in the United States and a national marine sanctuary, is home to hundreds of kinds of fish and other tropical sea life. Manta rays and turtles visit regularly, as do whale sharks and schools of hammerhead sharks. Other wonders include the annual mass coral spawns and a briny depression called Gollum Lake. Nearby are two other reefs. Stetson Bank, its top spotted with hard corals, mollusks, and sponges, is known for its diversity—from black sea hares to golden smooth trunkfish. At Geyer Bank, thousands of butterfly fish dominate a huge population of tropical fish whose density rivals that of the coral reefs in the South Pacific. Protruding from the flat, muddy continental shelf, these and thirty other natural reefs support an exceptional amount and variety of sea life in Texas waters. They sit amid hundreds of oil and gas platforms, which create their own special reef ecosystems. These reefs, equal in their profusion of life and color to the storied reefs of Florida and Hawaii, have not been widely known to Texans outside of a small group of scientists and divers. With extraordinary photographs and a knowledgeable first-person narrative, author Jesse Cancelmo instills an appreciation for the beauty and fragility of one of the state’s least-known natural environments. Texas Coral Reefs will inspire adventurers—both the underwater and armchair varieties—to enjoy these spectacular but little-known sites that lie so close to home.

In 1974, the Massachusetts Audubon Society and the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife launched a five-year survey to map the distribution of all the birds that breed in the Commonwealth - the first such comprehensive effort in North America. Nearly 600 volunteers spent countless hours in the field collecting data. This landmark volume presents the results of their efforts. The book includes distribution maps showing possible, probable, and confirmed breeding areas for 198 Massachusetts nesting species on a grid of 989 tensquare-mile blocks. Opposite each species map is a summary account giving historical perspective, relative abundance, habitat, seasonal schedule, nest, egg, and song descriptions, clutch size, egg dates, number of broods, and other pertinent details. Each species account is illustrated with a scrupulously accurate, watercolor portrait by award-winning nature artists John Sill and Barry Van Dusen. The book also includes a set of six transparent overlay maps in an attached pocket that allow the reader to correlate key environmental factors with the distribution of nesting species. Introductory sections describe the atlas survey methodology, and two appe