For ten years, internationally respected photographer and writer Fred Bruemmer traveled around the world to capture on film the staggering spectacle of massed animals of all kinds. Glimpses of Paradise is just that: a peek into a world rapidly fading into extinction -- an Eden where animals and birds pulsed across the earth and through the air in huge numbers. Coupled with Bruemmer's engaging and earnest text, this is a stunning record of a world few have the privilege to see.

While forty-five animal and bird species from all corners of the globe are featured, all of these massings reveal the truly remarkable, interdependent relationships that are the web of nature. Masses of shorebirds migrating to their arctic breeding grounds stop along the Jersey shores to fill up on billions of eggs left by massing horseshoe crabs. In the Amazon, pierid butter- flies mass near Madre de Dios River, where they sip the salty tears of nesting turtles. Risking their lives, Peru's blue-headed parrots flock to exposed cliff-sides to lick the clay that protects them from the poisons in their preferred food, unripe fruit.

From across the world, Bruemmer brings us stunning photographs of nature's spectacles, including:

• a million wildebeests -- the last great massing of an animal species in Africa
• the world's largest black-browed albatross colony nesting on the Falklands Island
• Africa's immense Rift Valley is dusted pink by a million flamingos
• the world's only colonies of king penguins on Antarctica's South Georgia Island
• millions of monarch butterflies filling the tree tops of remote Mexican mountains
• the roar of Canada's migrating caribou, last of North America's great wildlife herds
• millions of ladybird beetles "painting" remote Arizona hills in a deep red lacquer
• a thousand beluga whales congregating in Canada's Arctic to mate, molt and talk

Glimpses of Paradise is a remarkable vision of a natural world teeming with life. It is an essential addition to nature photography collections, both for its accurate and up-to-date text and for its stunning wildlife images.