Walton Ford (born 1960 in Larchmont, New York) is an American artist who makes paintings and prints in the style of Audubon's naturalist illustrations. Each of his paintings is a meticulous study in flora and fauna, while being filled with symbols, clues and jokes referencing a multitude of texts from colonial literature and folktales to travel guides. Ford's paintings are complex narratives that critique the history of colonialism, industrialism, politics, natural science, and humanity's effect on the environment. His prints are meticulous and fastidious in execution. Dying Words from 2005 is a combination color etching, aquatint and drypoint on paper in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art. In this print, the extinct Carolina parakeet replaces people in Benjamin West's famous painting, The Death of General Wolfe.

This book features a natural selection: Ford's beautifully savage beasts and birds. Walton Ford's watercolors of animals could be mistaken for 19th century natural science illustrations or British colonial paintings. Except they're not. Something strange and usually sinister is happening in each of Ford's works, whether it's a wild turkey crushing a small parrot with its claw, a collection of monkeys wreaking havoc on a formally set dinner table, or an American buffalo surrounded by a pack of bloodied white wolves...in the middle of a proper French garden. Painted with the deft technique of a technical artist, Ford's works vibrate with an intensity of uncanny familiarity; they are both reassuring in style and disturbing in content. With titles like "Au Revoir Zaire", "Necropolis", and "Dirty Dick Burton's Aide de Camp", and "Space Monkey", his paintings open the doors to a world of real-life fantasy, dreams, and nightmares - all with a stunning candor that almost belies the artist's intentions. Collected together for the first time as a limited-edition book, and now available as a popular edition, Ford's bestiary takes its name from one of the texts he frequently refers back to in his work: "The Pancha Tantra", the ancient Indian book of animal fables collected from 3rd-5th Centuries B.C. and considered to be the precursor to "Aesop's Fables". This book provides an in-depth exploration of Walton Ford's oeuvre. It also includes a complete professional biography as well as substantial excerpts from the textual sources for the paintings, from Vietnamese folktales and the letters of Benjamin Franklin to the "Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini" and John James Audubon's "Ornithological Biography".