Time Is Short and the Water Rises, Operation Gwamba: The Story of the Rescue of 10,000 Animals from Certain Death in a South American Rain Forest

From dust jacket notes: “Illustrated with 19 full-color photographs, 22 black-and-white photographs, and 2 maps…Operation Gwamba began when ISPA (the International Society for the Protection of Animals) learned that thousands of forest creatures were trapped by the spreading artificial lake behind the new Afobaka Dam in Surinam – formerly Dutch Guiana. To Surinam, ISPA sent John Walsh, a young man trained in rescue techniques by the Massachusetts SPCA. what followed was one of this century’s most extraordinary true adventures of man and animal….Time Is Short and the Water Rises, is John Walsh’s own vivid story of his adventures written with Robert Gannon. It is the story of Walsh’s first capture, a half-starved three-fingered sloth who, when released, fled in slow motion panic up the nearest tree…of a pygmy anteater whose unaccountable hostility was explained when, the night of its rescue, it gave birth to ‘a single, thimble-size, hairless, big-nosed replica’ of itself…of the anaconda which initiated a hair-raising wrestling match. But, above all it is an amazing adventure tale about the nick-of-time rescue of 10,000 helpless creatures – armadillos, tortoises, sloths, anteaters, opossums, giant snakes, kinkajous, tapirs, ocelots, and dozens of other species….”