Lonely Planet Lonely Planet's A-Z of Wildlife Watching

By Lonely Planet, Amy-Jane Beer and Mark Carwardine

Discover the best places to spot 300 of the world’s most exciting and unusual creatures, from the soaring Andean condor and prowling Bengal tiger, to singing humpback whales and migrating wildebeest.

For many people, one of the most rewarding experiences of travel is seeing creatures you wouldn’t encounter back home. Whether you set out to see them on safari or spot them by sheer luck, there’s a thrill and a beauty in watching a wild animal in its natural habitat.

That’s why we created Lonely Planet’s A-Z of Wildlife Watching. It’s packed with stunning photos, details of each creature’s habits and characteristics, and tips on how to increase the chances of an encounter.

Inside, you’ll find all the most iconic animals like lions, tigers, elephants and sharks, but we’ve gone even further than these headline acts to showcase the mind-blowing diversity of the natural world, with other animals including: snow leopards, mountain goats, antelopes, fennec foxes, giant albatrosses, hog-nosed bats, giant clams, corals, whales, wobbegongs, birdwing butterflies and Hercules beetles.

Created in consultation with biologist and writer Amy-Jane Beer, and with a foreword by nature photographer Mark Carwardine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lonely Planet
• Release date: Sep 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781788682039

Lonely Planet

Lonely Planet has gone on to become the world’s most successful travel publisher, printing over 100 million books. The guides are printed in nine different languages; English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Chinese and Korean. Lonely Planet enables curious travellers to experience the world and get to the heart of a place via guidebooks and eBooks to almost every destination on the planet, an award-winning website and magazine, a range of mobile and digital travel products and a dedicated traveller community.

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Zorilla

Aardvark Orycteropus afer

WHAT The name translates as ‘earth-pig’, but while true pigs are hoofed mammals, this secretive ant guzzler is in a group of its own. A night safari is essential if your heart is set on an encounter. You might meet one on its nightly rounds, where it uses senses of hearing and smell so acute that vision is almost redundant. That comical snout contains arguably the most complex olfactory apparatus in the animal kingdom, and the area of an aardvark’s brain dedicated to smelling is hugely enlarged. Having sniffed out an ant or termite mound, the aardvark uses sharp, hooflike claws to break in, then slurps up prey with its long, sticky tongue.

WHERE Several reserves in the South African Karoo offer specialist aardvark tours, aiming to track their resident aardvarks as they snuffle between ant or termite mounds.

© David Da Costa / Alamy Stock Photo

African savannah elephant Loxodonta africana

WHAT If the lion is Africa’s king of beasts, this magnificent pachyderm, the world’s largest land animal, might be its high priestess. Elephant society is orderly, cooperative, empathetic and matriarchal, and an encounter in the wild leaves you in no doubt you’ve been touched by greatness – three to six tonnes of it. Elephants make an equally big impression on the landscapes they occupy. Their feeding habits play a major part in maintaining the characteristic open woodland of the savannah, and stimulating regrowth of the trees they push down or rip up.

WHERE The once vast range of the plains elephants across eastern and southern Africa is increasingly fragmented by human development, but responsible elephant tourism has an important role to play in improving a strained relationship between the species and human communities. The largest remaining population is in Botswana’s Chobe National Park.

© Jonathan Gregson | Lonely Planet

© Michael Heffernan | Lonely Planet

African wild dog Lycaon pictus

WHAT Loping through the savannah, a pack of African wild dogs is one of the most accomplished hunting teams in the natural world. The lithe canines, standing up to 75cm tall at the shoulder, run their prey – often gazelles – to ground over long distances, with an 80% success rate. Despite their prowess, they’re increasingly endangered and just 5000 survive in the wild, mostly in southern Africa and the south of east