A Collection of Educational Nature Bulletins
Our award-winning textbook, and the source of most of the course material. Every page is a stand-alone lesson, which is what makes it readable in short sittings and useful long after you’ve finished the course.
Download for desktop and printing · Download for phone and slower connections
Free, and built to be shared
These resources are meant to be useful in their own right — not teasers for a paid course. If you never enrol, the book still does its job.
The Primer is released under a Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–NoDerivatives 4.0 license. That’s deliberate. This organization exists to promote Conservation Through Education, and a book that only its owner can use isn’t doing that job.
It’s also designed — from the first page of layout — to print at full fidelity on ordinary printer paper. Not “acceptable when printed.” Designed for it.
Together those two things mean you can take what you’ve learned and teach it.
Using this in your own outreach
You can do all of this right now, no permission needed:
- Print the whole book, or any single bulletin, and hand it out
- Give copies to a scout troop, a classroom, a library table, a trailhead booth, a neighbor who wants to kill every snake in the yard
- Share the PDF file, post the download link, email it around
- Put unaltered pages into a packet for a program you’re running
- Use it in your own teaching, paid or unpaid, as a resource you hand to people
Just keep the attribution on it, and don’t charge for the material itself.
Write to us first for these, and the answer is usually yes:
- Translating a bulletin into another language
- Adapting the reading level for a younger or different audience
- Pulling content into slides, signage, or a handout of your own design
- Anything at a for-profit organization where you’re unsure whether it counts as commercial
Say what you want to do and who it’s for. We’re not looking for a formal proposal.
The one line we hold: don’t sell the material, and don’t build a competing paid course out of it. Everything else is negotiable.
In print
The hardcover edition is currently out of stock and we can’t say when that will change. Used copies turn up on Amazon from time to time.
If you want a physical copy sooner than that, print it. It’s built for it.
What people have said
Read the review in Herpetological Review, the journal of the Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles. Jennifer A. Sevin of the University of Richmond concluded that the Primer fills a gap in the herpetological literature.
It also holds a 4.9 average across 43 Amazon ratings. One reviewer added it to the required reading list for new interns at The Rattlesnake Conservancy; a veterinarian who works with exotics wrote that they learned something new on almost every page.
“If I were still teaching herpetology, the Primer would be required reading for all students, both graduates and undergraduates.” — Dr. J. Whitfield Gibbons, Professor Emeritus of Ecology, University of Georgia
If you want the guided version
The Primer is the source of most of the course material, and it stands on its own — that is the point of putting it here for free. The Certified Herpetological Guide course puts it in sequence and adds video lessons, knowledge checks, applied field activities, and a certificate of completion. Self-paced, open book, no deadline, $149.