DESERT BABIES

Budding naturalists will enjoy these brief, colorful portraits of 14 desert animals, familiar and strange, including the camel, caracal, gemsbok, mouse, uromastyx, quokka, coyote, emu, lemur, rattlesnake, tarantula, nilgai, tortoise, and vulture. Each animal is presented on a spread with full-color photos, a brief, chatty text, and a table of facts (birthplace, birth and adult sizes, littermates, favorite foods, parental care, enemies, etc.). An introductory page shows the location of deserts around the world; a final page discusses why such places must be protected. The photos are appealing, although whether the animal pictured is an adult or baby is not always clear; the animals were photographed in preserves—not in their desert habitat—so the backgrounds may mislead, in spite of the use of symbols to cue readers in. The text includes odd facts that are intriguing, but sometimes excessively cute (the emu father calls, ``Come to daddy,'' when the weather is hot; ``vultures eat the most disgusting, yucky things you can imagine''). A companion volume, Seashore Babies (0-8027-8476-3; PLB -8477-1), describes 14 sea animals. (map) (Picture book/nonfiction. 7-10)