The second leg of the Robot Races take Jimmy and Maverick to the Amazon Rain Forest.

Madcap, modern yet mythological adventure! Aries, the ghost of the ram of Golden Fleece fame, is feeling slighted that no one sees him as a real hero, even though on his first quest to Earth he thwarted wicked sorceress Medea. But Medea is plotting again, in the rainforests of the fabled land of El Dorado, and goddess Athena wants Aries and his best friend Alex, zookeeper of the Underworld, to stop her. But this time a 'professional hero' is being sent with them - none other than Aries' arch-nemesis, Jason! Things are worse than they know, however. Their friend Rose is in the Amazon too, searching for her lost father, and Medea needs Rose's help to restore her powers and wreak revenge, not only on Earth but also in the Underworld . . . and Medea knows just how to manipulate Rose into doing it. Filled with laugh-out-loud humour, magic and mayhem, this courageous quest pits classic Greek myth and heroism against a modern world full of danger, and the deceptions lurking deep in the heart of the dark jungle.

Jimmy and Maverick compete in the Robot Race in the Arctic, where not everyone is playing fair.

The second leg of the Robot Races take Jimmy and Maverick to the Amazon Rain Forest.

Jimmy and Maverick much cross the Sahara Desert during this leg of the Robot Races.

Nowhere eise in the world did industrialized countries leave such early marks in the rainforest as in West Africa. Past and present developments here are in one way or the other significant for rainforests on other continents as weil. West Africa is a pioneer in both a good and a bad sense. This is reason enough to take a closer Iook at the history of moist tropical West Africa. Until recently, no one really seemed to be interested in the rainforests except for a few specialists. The world's scientific community neglected to study the incalculable riches of tropical forests, to make the public aware of them and their due importance. Although interdisciplinary research has been a popular topic for some decades now, it was not applied to just the most complex habitat on earth. Scientists from all fields studied only that which was easiest to record, seemingly blind to a myriad of details awaiting closer examination. Botanists wentabout establishing their herbariums and paid much too little attention to the vegetation as a whole, or to the significance of useful plants for local populations. Zoologists, too, busied themselves with collecting and describing species. Anthropologists, on the other hand, tended to overlook faunal details: in their ignorance of the animal world, they wrote of tigers and deer in Africa. And finally, foresters saw neither the forest nor the trees for the timber - and even confused rainforests with monocultures of fir trees.

The guide to neotropical bird behavior that picks up where field guides leave off. Why are tropical birds like parrots and quetzals so much more colorful than those in more temperate climates? How can a vulture soaring thousands of feet above the canopy spot a dead rodent no bigger than a mouse on the rainforest floor? What permits sparrow-sized antbirds to not only survive but to thrive among relentless hordes of army ants that devour every other living thing in their path? Steven Hilty has led birding tours to the American Tropics for decades. By providing answers to the hundreds of questions asked by participants of these expeditions, Hilty has produced a natural history of the bird life of the New World Tropics that is at once practical, accurate, and as endlessly fascinating as the species whose lives it reveals. Birds of Tropical America was published by Chapters Publishing in 1994 and went out of print in 1997. UT Press is pleased to reissue it with a new epilogue and updated references.