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 The Wildlife Detectives
How Forensic Scientists Fight Crimes Against Nature
by Donna M. Jackson
Photographs by Wendy Shattil and Bob Rozinski
(Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000; Paperback 2002)
Slaughtering elephants for their ivory, shooting bears for their gall bladders, capturing sea turtles for soup. In the name of vanity, fashion and greed, people stalk and kill wild animals -- and get away with it,
even when their acts are clearly against the law. But now scientists have a way to catch and convict poachers.
In a laboratory in Ashland, Oregon, they analyze clues from bone fragments to bloodstains. Firearms experts match bullets to guns. Ornithologists identify feathers. Using a high-powered scanning electron microscope,
scientists distinguish ivory taken illegally from elephants. Even though ninety percent of these crimes still go
unpunished, the wildlife detectives are, more and more often, linking suspects to victims. In words and pictures, The Wildlife Detectives tells a poignant story and shows how good science can indeed save the day!
Reviews
“Unfolds almost like a mystery novel . . . A book that will be welcomed by mystery fans and anyone who cares about animals.”
- Booklist
“A riveting and thorough account of dedicated people banding together with the help of science and the law to catch an elk poacher . . . . A real-life animal detective story.”
- Kirkus Reviews
“If all information books were structured as well as this one, students would read and read and read.”
- Children's Literature
"It's one thing to pass a law protecting endangered species; it's another to enforce it, as U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service officers well know. Fortunately, they have a unique weapon in their anti-poaching arsenal: the world's only crime laboratory specifically designed to examine animal evidence.
To show the lab in action, Jackson tracks an actual case, involving Charger, a popular, much-photographed Yellowstone Park elk who was killed one night for his magnificent antlers. Thanks to
witnesses, expert detective work, and an anonymous tip, a suspect is soon tracked down—but it's up to the lab technicians, using DNA analysis and other methods, to prove indisputably that man, gun, dead
animal and recovered antlers are linked.
To a tale that has all the fascination of a police procedural, the author adds heartrending comments about
the causes and effects of poaching, a survey of wildlife and endangered species legislation, and even a quick lesson on how to tell illegal elephant ivory from that legally harvested from frozen mammoths (hint:
all you need is a protractor and a scanning electron microscope). The photographers add an array of sharply detailed wildlife portraits to shots of lab workers, and telling views of the artifacts and evidence
they handle—one picture late in the book of Charger's body with the top of its head sawn off is potentially disturbing but not gratuitously so. This book present science as exciting, worthwhile work,
and from many young readers will spark a "Hey, I could do that!" reaction." Ages 10 to 13.
- John Peters — The Five Owls, September/October 2000 (Vol. 15 No. 1)
Related links
“It's a Guy Thing,” Jeff Wilhelm, Voices in the Middle, Number 2, December 2002, pp 60-63.
Blood, Bones and Bugs: School Library Journal
Order THE WILDLIFE DETECTIVES from Amazon.com
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