Request for photographs of South American mammals

As some of you are already aware Jeff Blincow and I are working on a photographic field guide to roughly 350 (depending on future taxonomic changes) larger land-based mammals of South America for Princeton University Press. I have completed roughly 50% of the text while Jeff is completing the maps and compiling the photos for the book.

We are using IUCN taxonomy and a list of the species we are still seeking photos for is attached. Those species for which we already have suitable photos are omitted from the list. In some cases we already have photos but are seeking additional photos.

For logistical and practical reasons we are only including larger species that are likely to be seen and to be identifiable in the field, e.g. we have chosen to include all the squirrels and the larger opossums but not the mouse opossums although the final species list remains under review. At present we have decided to omit cavies and tuco-tucos but if space permits we will add them at a later date.

A number of photographers including lodges and tour guides in South and Central America have already generously donated photos. However there are still a lot of gaps and for many species we believe that better photographs are probably available and we would be delighted to receive photos from anyone in the mammalwatching.com community who feels they have photos suitable for publication. We are interested in good quality, high-resolution images of all species but if you have images of less common species that are difficult to photograph we are also interested in lower quality images. Although we would prefer to use photos taken in the wild we appreciate that we may need to use photos of captive individuals of some species. These will be clearly marked as such in the book.

We appreciate that many of you will have lots of photos and that it takes time to go through your images to select photos. However for the book to be as useful as possible to the mammal-watching community and beyond we need as many good photographs as possible to illustrate the identification of each species so any help that you can provide would be greatly appreciated even if you are only able to send us one or two photos particularly of rarely-photographed species.

Smaller images can be sent directly to Jeff at jblincow@hotmail.com but if you have larger images or a lot of images to send over it may be easier to upload them to the pCloud account that he has set up for the submission of large/multiple photos: https://my.pcloud.com/#page=puplink&code=n9YZGneHyjoyLxflGpMHvHffdVJDTESX   

Please contact Jeff if you are planning to upload images to the pCloud account.

If we decide that we would like to use any of your images we will contact you again by e-mail to discuss usage and image rights. We may be able to offer a payment for the use of your images although funds are limited even though we are supplementing the available budget ourselves. All photographers who supply photos will be acknowledged in the book.

Thanks in anticipation of your support.

Richard Webb and Jeff Blincow

Mammals of South America photo requirements