SAVE THE FLORIDA KEY DEER

Clark (The Endangered Florida Panther, 1993, etc.) describes efforts to save the Florida Key deer, a toy-sized subspecies of the white-tailed deer. She provides a brief history, physical description, information on its life cycle, endangered status, and conservation efforts. The full-color pictures by various photographers range from a charming close-up of a fawn to a muddy shot of a deer at a water hole, to photographs of traffic signs- -one blurry—that serve as filler. None of them provide a visual gauge of the animal's size. The writing is pedestrian and at times imprecise: ``The doe is a good mother. During the day she rests near the place where the fawn is hidden . . . every little while the doe goes to feed her baby'' and ``fawns are more alert than human babies.'' Most readers will be better served by a more general title on endangered species. (index) (Nonfiction. 10-12)