While the brief text will assist students with school assignments, it is the paintings which demand that the book be purchased. Although colour photos could show equally well what the various animals look like, it is unlikely that they would capture the same sense of "story" that Parker's paintings evoke. A trio of wolves lope through a snow covered forest while a white-tailed deer stands frozen, trusting that its tan-coloured hide will successfully camouflage its presence. A lynx sits patiently staring at its prey, waiting for the absolutely correct moment to pounce. Caught in mid-gulp, a moose raises its dripping head to look at what has disturbed its placid grazing in a swamp. For ten of the animals, their paintings spread across facing pages of this horizontally designed book while the remaining four each have a page to themselves. As the illustrations were paintings before they became part of a children's book, Parker, in deciding upon his paintings' composition, did not have to take into account the realities of a book's centre gutter. However, transforming the paintings into illustrations has created some minor annoyances, such as the loss of an eagle's beak, and one major error. The effect of the dramatic closing illustration of a pair of mountain goats being buffeted by a winter storm is greatly diminished because the head of one of the goats is almost completely lost in the gutter. Oddly, this mistake could have been averted simply by shifting the painting to the right and by moving the accompanying text to the illustration's left side.

Though Rocky Mountain Wildlife's connections to animal study are obvious, the book's paintings also have a place in language arts classes where their dramatic freeze frame qualities could serve as stimuli for creative writing.

Highly Recommended.