This fight, between a vine and a tree I met, has been going on for many years.
As a result of this ferocious competition for sunlight, life in the rainforest has moved from the floor to the canopy. We as humans have learned to look around us for food or danger, but something I noticed about the rainforest was how often I wound up looking up to see wildlife. There’s a whole extra axis for rainforest animals to worry about.
The rainforests cover only a small fraction of the earth, but are thought to be home to over half of the planet’s plant and animal species. They remove a tremendous amount of carbon from the atmosphere and therefore mitigate global climate change, provide resources to indigenous people, and are an essential part of the global water cycle . . . yet they’re being cut down rapidly. I hope that some of The Lost Rainforest’s readers will join me in helping them.
Q. Could you share some of the resources on the rainforest and its inhabitants that you found most useful?
A. Yes! Here are my favorites:
I’m a big fan of www.mongabay.com, which has many informative articles about the rainforest, with sections geared for kids and for older readers. As a place to start, they have a great handout available at http://kids.mongabay.com/lesson_plans/handout.html, including a quiz for classroom use!
For a more in-depth account, John Kricher’s book A Neotropical Companion is rigorous and accessible and taught me many of the details of jungle life.
On the film side, the very best I can recommend are the riveting “Jungle” episodes of the Planet Earth and Planet Earth II documentary series that the BBC released in 2006 and 2016.
For those who become ant-obsessed like me, I recommend the documentary E. O. Wilson: Of Ants and Men, which is a portrait both of the study of ants and of one of our most important scientists. The BBC series Life in the Undergrowth is also an excellent source of information, and of filmed accounts of invertebrate life. For books, Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson’s The Ants and The Superorganism are the bibles of the field. I found Deborah Gordon’s Ants at Work very useful, too.
Q. Were there more rainforest animals that you wish you could have included in Mez’s Magic?
A. Yes, so many! I hope maybe some young writers out there will choose a new rainforest animal, figure out whether it’s a nightwalker or a daywalker, and come up with a personality and a magical ability for the new eclipse-born. Maybe you could even write an adventure for the animal to go on! Did Auriel come looking for this eclipse-born, too? What happened next?
There are so many rainforest animals out there, but here are some that almost made it into Mez’s Magic, but I just didn’t have enough space in the pages:
hoatzin
tapir
capybara
Brazilian porcupine
peccary
Arrau turtle
glass frog
fer-de-lance (pit viper)
opossum
Author trying to look like a tough jungle guide. Maybe should have taken the glasses off.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book wouldn’t have happened without Melissa Miller. I was over the moon the day that she wrote to ask if I’d work on a series about rainforest animals for her. THANK YOU, Melissa. Caldera is yours! (In a non-creepy-Ant-Queen way, of course.)
I couldn’t be more pleased with the team at Katherine Tegen Books. You’ve been great caretakers, and Ben Rosenthal, this book found a terrific editorial home with you. I feel very lucky.
For making my Peruvian Amazon trip so amazing: thank you, David Veinot, Sarah Ducharme, Isabel Galleymore, EmmaLeen Tomalin, Oscar Mishaja Salazar, and the rest of the staff at the Tambopata Research Center.
As always, many thanks to my agent, Richard Pine, and this book’s essential early readers: Daphne Grab, Donna Freitas, Marianna Baer, Jill Santopolo, Anne Heltzel, Marie Rutkoski, Eric Zahler, Kathi Rudawsky, Gloria Lepik Corrigan, and Barbara Schrefer. (Take note, world: moms make great line editors!)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Courtesy Eliot Schrefer
ELIOT SCHREFER is a New York Times bestselling author, has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award in Young People’s Literature, and has won the Green Earth Book Award and the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award for Children’s Literature. His novels include Endangered, Threatened, Rescued, and two books in the Spirit Animals series. He lives in New York City, is on the faculty of the Fairleigh Dickinson University MFA in creative writing program, and is the children’s book reviewer for USA Today. Visit him online at www.eliotschrefer.com.
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CREDITS
Cover art by Emilia Dziubak
Cover design by David Curtis
COPYRIGHT
Katherine Tegen Books is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
THE LOST RAINFOREST: MEZ’S MAGIC. Text copyright © 2018 by HarperCollins Publishers. Illustrations copyright © 2018 by Emilia Dziubak. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2017934898
ISBN 978-0-06-249107-7
EPub Edition © January 2018 ISBN 9780062491091
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FIRST EDITION
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1. Quoted in Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson, The Superorganism (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008), xviii.
2. Hölldobler and Wilson, The Superorganism, 5.
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