Animals & Insects

The truth about vultures, with Wayne Grady and Mike Wallace. Grady's new book, "Vulture: Ghastly Gourmet," (Sierra Club Books) describes in words and photographs the life of the vulture. Wallace is the Los Angeles Zoo's vulture specialist. He is the Curator of Conservation and Science at the zoo, as well as being the Condor Species Survival Program Coordinator for the American Zoo and Aquarium Association.

Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio are the authors of "Man Eating Bugs: The Art and Science of Eating Insects" (A Material World Book/Ten Speed Press). The book is a pictorial guide to how insects are made delectable throughout the world.

Journalist Burkhand Bilger. He's currently working on a new book about clandestine Southern traditions (to be published by Scribner's). For now, his article "Enter the Chicken" appears in Harper's Magazine (March 1999). It's about cockfighting in Louisiana, where it's legal, but still secret.

Craig Stanford studies chimpanzees and gorillas in Uganda. In early March, Hutu rebels kidnapped 14 westerners including his field assistant. 8 of the hostages were killed. Stanford had left the region before the attack. Stanford talks about the political situation and its impact on the wildlife there. He is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Southern California. He is the author of "The Hunting Apes," and "Chimpanzee and Red Colobus."

William Karesh is a wildlife veterinarian in some of the world's most remote areas. He's written about his experiences in "Appointment at the Ends of the World: Memoirs of a Wildlife Veterinarian." (Warner Books) Karesh heads the International Field Veterinary Program for the Wildlife Conservation Society, located at the Bronx Zoo,in New York.

Birder and naturalist Scott Weidensaul author of "Living on the Wind" (North Point Press) discusses the habits of migratory birds, what makes them do what they do, and how they're able to do it.

Paleontologist Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago. He recently unearthing Jobaria (Joe-BAR-ee-ah) and Suchomimus (sue-coe- MIME-us) -- two new rivals to Tyrannosaurus Rex in West Africa. They're two of the newest additions to the dinosaur family.

Co-founder of the Siberian Tiger Project Maurice Hornocker and an authority on the great cats. His photographs of Tigers are featured In "Tigers In the Snow" (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux) by Peter Matthiessen about the tigers of Siberia. The Siberian Tiger Project was founded to study and protect these tigers who are threatened with extinction because of poaching and loss of habitat. Hornocker Is also director of the Hornocker Wildlife Institute at the University of Idaho.

Legal expert on animal protection law, Steven Wise. He teaches "Animal Rights Law" at Harvard Law School and other colleges, and Is former president of the Animal Legal Defense Fund. In his new book "Rattling the Cage: Towards Legal Rights for Animals" (Perseus Books) he uses scientific research about the Intelligence and emotional capacity of animals to argue for their basic legal rights.

Forensic entomologist M. Lee Goff is the author of the new book “A Fly for the Prosecution: How Insect Evidence Helps Solve Crimes” (Harvard University Press). Goff examines the insect life that inhabits a decomposing corpse, to understand when a person died and other circumstances of death. (THIS INTERVIEW CONTINUES THRU THE END OF THE SHOW).

Author Kevin Conley. His new book is about breeding racehorses. Its called STUD: Adventures in Breeding.(Bloomsbury) STUD explores the process of creating champions, from the farms of Kentucky, where stud fees command a half million a pop, to the horse auctions, where the worlds richest people compete for the top yearlings.

Stephan Bognar is a field agent for the San Francisco-based international non-profit wildlife conservation group, WildAid. Bognar just returned from two months in Baghdad, where he helped with the effort to rescue and rehabilitate the animals at the Baghdad Zoo. When he arrived, only 32 of the 600 animals remained, the rest were stolen or roaming the streets. The ones left at the zoo were suffering from neglect, malnutrition and dehydration. Bognar helped in the efforts to care for the animals, and to find the lost ones.

His new book is Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind. He’s also the author of The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions, which received the John Burroughs Medal for natural history writing. Quamman is the author of five nonfiction books, and four books of fiction. He’s been honored with the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has written for National Geographic, Outside and Harper’s.

Jon Katz is the author of the book, The New Work of Dogs: Tending to Life, Love, and Family It's about how attached many of us have become to our dogs, treating them more like family members and human surrogates than pets.

Sullivan is the author of the critically acclaimed books, The Meadowlands and A Whale Hunt. His new book is Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants. One reviewer writes, "in prose worthy of Joseph Mitchell, a... skittering, scurrying, terrific natural history." Sullivan is a contributing editor to Vogue and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker.

Albrecht is a former police officer who used to work with search and rescue dogs. She now searches for lost pets using her specially trained bloodhounds, and a Weimaraner. Along the way she is developing data about how lost animals behave, and how to best find them. Her new book is The Lost Pet Chronicles: Adventures of a K-9 Cop Turned Pet Detective. Albrecht also founded, and is executive director of, the non-profit National Center for Missing Pets in San Jose, Calif.

Margaret McLaughlin, director of Bergh Memorial Animal Hospital's veterinary technicians in New York City, is part of an ASPCA rescue team that is finding and treating lost animals in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. She talks about the plight of animals in the battered Gulf Coast states.

The Veterinary Genetics Lab at UC-Davis has been called "the CSI of the four-legged world." The lab, directed by Beth Wictum, uses DNA samples from pets and other animals to help solve a variety of crimes.