Arctic Animals

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The Arctic, wrote Marco Polo in 1296, "is the Region of Darkness...[where] during most of the winter the sun is invisible", a fearsome, frozen land inhabited by strange creatures such as "bears of white colour and of prodigious size". The Arctic's aura of mystery has for centuries made its animals valued treasures. Ptolemy II, king of ancient Egypt, kept a polar bear in his private zoo at Alexandria. Ivan the Terrible of Russia sent Mary Tudor an arctic gyrfalcon. This tradition continues. The Chinese government gifted two giant pandas, Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, to the United States in 1972 after President Richard Nixon's historic visit to China. President Nixon reciprocated by sending back a pair of muskoxen. Alive with over fifty colour and forty black-and-white photographs, Arctic Animals is both a dazzling tribute to and explanation of man's fascination with the Arctic. Respected author and photographer Fred Bruemmer documents the profusion of animals and plants that are so superbly adapted to "the last great wilderness". In doing so he underlines the fragile ecostructure of the Arctic and reveals how man's rapaciousness continues to threaten it. The Inuit call the North nunassiaq, which means the beautiful land. At once a breathtaking pictorial chronicle and rich naturalist history, Arctic Animals serves as elegant testimony to the Inuit's belief and marks the brilliant culmination of Fred Bruemmer's twenty-year fascination with the Arctic. .