Creatures of a lost world

Built for Speed: A Year

in the Life of Pronghorn

John A. Byers

Harvard University Press, $24.95

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It is unfortunate that the citizens of California have been deprived of one of their greatest natural legacies, the gigantic herds of pronghorn antelope that once surged over the state’s grasslands as if it were the Serengeti. Most of us will never see these graceful and skittish creatures, but here is the story of a man who has spent 20 years observing them.

Although a biologist who is obsessed with his subject could spout facts and numbers for hours, Byers suppresses neither his highly poetic sensibility nor his boundless joy in the marvels of life. The result is a work of literature, as when he describes the song of meadowlarks as “a low flood of burbling that spreads across the prairie like the sheet of light that fireflies make at grass tops after a thunderstorm.� But readers also gain a tremendous sense of pronghorns’ lives, down to the tiniest details of how fawns survive.

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-- David Lukas