An introduction to the habitat, physical characteristics, behavior, and life cycle of quetzals, beautiful birds that live in the rain forests of Central America and South America.

The quetzal is the national bird of Guatemala and lends its name to that country's currency. In fact, the quetzal has long been revered for its beautiful feathers. In ancient times, the Mayan people used quetzal feathers as money. Your fascinated readers will find out more about this resplendent bird and some of its neighbors, such as the toucan and the macaw.

Beautifully illustrated with color plates and line drawings, this comprehensive review of trogons and quetzals -- the first to be published in more than 150 years -- covers all thirty-nine extant species. This up-to-date survey will serve as a valuable reference for ornithologists, conservationists, aviculturalists, and birdwatchers worldwide.

A reference encyclopedia providing information on endangered wildlife and plants throughout the world.

In The Chicken and the Quetzal Paul Kockelman theorizes the creation, measurement, and capture of value by recounting the cultural history of a village in Guatemala's highland cloud forests and its relation to conservation movements and ecotourism. In 1990 a group of German ecologists founded an NGO to help preserve the habitat of the resplendent quetzal—the strikingly beautiful national bird of Guatemala—near the village of Chicacnab. The ecotourism project they established in Chicacnab was meant to provide new sources of income for its residents so they would abandon farming methods that destroyed quetzal habitat. The pressure on villagers to change their practices created new values and forced negotiations between indigenous worldviews and the conservationists' goals. Kockelman uses this story to offer a sweeping theoretical framework for understanding the entanglement of values as they are interpreted and travel across different and often incommensurate ontological worlds. His theorizations apply widely to studies of the production of value, the changing ways people make value portable, and value's relationship to ontology, affect, and selfhood.

The continuing story of the residents of the planet Donovan as survival becomes more of a struggle.