Nic Bishop Snakes

Nic Bishop Snakes
by Nic Bishop
Scholastic, 2012. 48 pgs. Non-fiction

     Nic Bishop finally gets around to snakes, and with the same powerful and startling effect that characterizes his other wildlife photograph books. The cover has a brilliantly colored African horned bush viper striking right smack at your face (see above). Inside, pictures of emerald tree boas, African egg-eaters, and eyelash vipers are so vivid you dare not stick your finger between the pages to save your place. Bishop's text is informative and easily accessible to young snake fans or to nature-lovers of any age.  Kids can learn how snakes move around without legs, which are the largest, which the most poisonous (of land snakes), and how they unhinge their jaws to swallow prey. One sort of creepy pictures shows a constrictor apparently squishing an unnamed rodent, but Bishop explains that he combined separate pictures for that shot, so is the rodent is perishing, it is not because of the snake. Young people may be particularly interested in the lengths to which he had to go to catch the snakes in various poses--they all lived in his house while he was taking these pictures.