The Great Apes: Our Face in Nature's Mirror

The Great Apes are our closest living relatives. Yet, even as we delight and wonder at the superb images contained in this book, these magnificent and intelligent creatures are being pushed slowly and quietly towards extinction.
Confined to the tropical areas of Africa and South-East Asia, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orang-utans live in areas where mining, logging and hunting increasingly threaten their future existence. Over thousands of years, humans have managed to destroy countless species of plants and animals that once shared our planet. While not all the species in the IUCN's Red Data Book are in danger because of our actions, the apes' dire predicament is due entirely to our greed and short-sightedness.
Apes are highly complex with intellectual abilities that continue to astonish us. In the pages of this timely and beautiful book, writer and photographer Michael Leach shows us the true nature of the great apes. He reveals the gorilla as a gentle vegetarian, the chimpanzee as an accomplished hunter and the orang-utan as a gifted mimic.
With a wealth of original photography, much of it showing the animals in their natural habitat, this is an intriguing guide to the apes. It explains their ancestry and relationship to humans, details their intelligence, family life, feeding habits and shows just how we have brought them to the edge of extinction. In his introduction, Michael Leach writes 'on a personal level, apes are our closest living relatives. How can we sit by and watch them die out before we really start to understand them?' in creating this book, he goes a long way to making that understanding a reality.