Recommended Reading

The following is a quick list of field guides and general interest books about the Amazon and Peru. All of them are very good, and are readily available both new and used through online booksellers such as Amazon.com. Please note: many of these guides are revised and updated fairly regularly; if you see a more recent edition of any of the books listed below, you should consider getting the newer version.

Recommended by Greg Greer, Senior Naturalist

Birds of Peru (Princeton Field Guides)

Thomas S. Schulenberg, Douglas F. Stotz, Daniel F. Lane
Princeton University Press, 2007
656 pages

This book is far superior to any of the previously published field guides about the birds of Peru. Each species has extremely accurate illustrations, with text and range maps on the opposite page, which makes it very easy for the user to make quick identifications. My copy travels in my carry-on luggage, next to my binoculars.

Recommended by Greg Greer, Senior Naturalist

Peru: The Ecotravellers’ Wildlife Guide (Ecotravellers Wildlife Guides)

Les Beletsky and David L. Pearson
Academic Press, 2000
500 pages

This informative, broad spectrum treatise is a general overview of some of the most common species observed in Peru. The early chapters cover ecotourism, geography, habitats, parks, and reserves, followed by illustrated species accounts on amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, insects and other arthropods.

Recommended by Greg Greer, Senior Naturalist and Melanie Jansen

One River

Wade Davis
Simon & Schuster, 1997
544 pages

This book is the intertwined narrative of the travels of the great Harvard ethnobotanist, Richard Evans Schultes and his protege, Wade Davis. This is a dense and enthralling book, full of firsthand accounts of cultures, wildlife, and plants (including the hallucinogenic types). It evokes a perilous, fascinating, and vanishing world, and you find yourself wondering if they make scholars like this anymore.

Highly Recommended by Melanie Jansen

Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice: an Ethnobotanist Searches for New Medicines in the Amazon Rainforest

Mark Plotkin
Penguin, 1994
328 pages

This book doesn’t cover the Peruvian Amazon (rather Suriname/Venezuela/Guyana), but it’s a must-read for anyone interested in indigenous peoples, ethnobotany, and impact of “civilization” on the Amazonian rainforest, as well as the vital information we can gather from the people and the land, hopefully before they are both gone forever. I have owned multiple copies of this book over the years, and have given them all away because I wanted to share it with others.