The cover sold me.

Whatever followed in the ensuing pages most likely would be riveting, and Mark Hendricks does not disappoint. As much as writers love to use words to create lasting images in readers' minds, Mr. Hendricks, a photographer, has captured the flora and fauna of Assateague Island National Seashore in a wonderful photo collection to be left visibly out for family and friends to enjoy.

Gracing the cover are three ponies, their manes swept here and there by the coastal breezes, that are indelibly linked to the national seashore that spans parts of Maryland and Virginia. Though the seashore's ponies are not native -- local lore has them surviving a shipwreck, or perhaps brought to the islands in the 17th century by their owners to graze -- they are an unofficial symbol of the national seashore.

Mr. Hendricks teases us into his book with these three ponies, and once inside it's easy to get figuratively lost in the landscape of Assateague. Here's an osprey overhead, carrying nesting materials, that the author photographed from his kayak. There's the 142-foot tall Assateague Light that dates to 1867, still sending its warning beacon out to sea.

Turn page after page and you'll encounter Royal terns caught, as it seems, in mid-conversation, a Snowy owl, delicate blackberry bush and the unusual barometer earthstar fungus that unfurls its leaves when rain and humidity arrive.

These are the images that help define Assateague Island National Seashore ... and help reinforce that key aspect of the National Park Service mission to "conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein..." not only within Assateague, but throughout the National Park System.

Spend a weekend or a week at Assateague, and you might come away thinking you experienced the seashore. Mr. Hendricks' book might convince you otherwise after you explore the images he presents to us. Prickly pear cactus at Asseateague? Yucca, which he captured in bloom. Blue grosbeaks and blue crabs. Fiddler crabs in battle, a solitary semipalmated plover strolling the beach in search of a meal. A red fox trotting through a landscape turned white by a winter storm.

The author also includes conservation messages in text sidebars, such as why we have to be aware of piping plovers. He explains the presence of Snowy owls, a species normally found in Canada but relatively rarely seen in coastal Virginia/Maryland, telling us that an overpopulation of the snowy white birds in their normal haunts "forces many to winter farther south than normal, where food and space is plentiful. Assateague Island, with vast numbers of prey sources and wide-open beach, provides excellent habitat for the visiting owl."

And he introduces us to perhaps the most famous of the seashore's horses, Charcoal, reportedly the only black stallion on the Maryland side of the seashore.

In today's wired world, where reading attention seems to focus on 140-character bites or poorly spelled texts, Natural Wonders of Assateague is both a quick exploration of the national seashore and one that sparks the curiosity, to visit as well as to read more about this magical spot in the National Park System.