Naturalist and world explorer William Beebe served as the director of the New York Zoological Society's Tropical Research Station in British Guiana (present day Guyana) in the years following World War I, during which time he kept extensive records of the wildlife in the Amazon rain forest. collects twelve amusing and meditative essays by Beebe on the destructive and comical activities of army ants and their leaf-cutting vegetarian cousins, the flight of enormous bats, tarantulas and the hawks that hunt them, and many other fascinating forms of tropical life.