A Family of Tortoises

The story of how wild tortoises survive on a Greek hillside, all done in ravishing colour by one of our favourite photo-authors (in fluent translation by Janet Sutton) forms the body of this excellent addition to Black's German-bought 'Animal Families' series. Walking, feeding, fighting, mating, laying, hatching, hibernating - we get to know them intimately here in a detail which is all the more valuable now that tortoise traffic is, thankfully, illegal.

Other members of the series deal with more familiar subjects - frogs, gorillas, donkeys, bats, owls and guinea pigs, and very nicely too, but a good tortoise book is something of a rarity and deserves special mention.