All posts by Grace Costantino

It’s that time of year again, when the ghosts, ghouls, and goblins come out to play, the dead walk, and little children dress up as their favorite monsters and scurry from house to house cramming countless pieces of candy into bulging bags.

BHL has been celebrating Halloween all week with tweets, Facebook posts and quizzes, and a Flickr collection dedicated to the holiday. While doing research for our festivities, we gathered countless myths and legends associated with the biodiversity of Hallow’s Eve. Come along with us as we explore Halloween from nature’s viewpoint, and, thanks to some inspiration provided by Smithsonian.com, find out how you can use BHL to transform yourself into the precise likeness of your favorite species!

In 1876, two men by the names of Frederick Godman and Osbert Salvin began work on perhaps the most comprehensive account of the flora and fauna of Mexico and Central America ever undertaken. Entitled Biologia Centrali Americana, this 63 volume work, published over the course of 36 years, relates nearly all information known at the time on the mammals, birds, fish, mollusks, insects, arachnids, and botany in the region. Accompanied by over 1,600 lithographic plates, 900 of which are colored, Biologia Centrali Americana is arguably the single most authoritative work on Mexico and Central America’s turn-of-the-century biodiversity and constitutes a perfect candidate to help us celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month!

Here in the Washington, D.C. area, where the BHL Secretariat is housed, North American wildlife is a hot topic with the grand opening of the new National Zoo American Trail exhibit. The exhibit features some of the most iconic American species, including the Bald Eagle, Gray Wolf, North American Beaver, and the Otter. We’ve been celebrating the exhibit all week on Twitter and Facebook, and we thought it only natural to further commemorate American fauna with our book of the week. To do so, we’ve selected Wild Animals of North America (1918), contributed by the American Museum of Natural History.