Science Ecology

In Birdland, journalist and lifelong twitcher Jon Gower explores our intimate connection with the bird life around us. From the symphonic song of the wren to the clack of a puffin’s beak and from epic migrations to sunset murmurations, birds are commonplace miracles. No wonder they have inspired our artists, writers and songwriters. Whether rare or abundant, Jon Gower visits some of the best places in Britain to watch birds, searching for some species he has always wanted to see such as wryneck, dotterel and barred warbler.

Rivers, more than any road, technology, or political leader, have shaped the course of human civilization. They have opened frontiers, founded cities, settled borders, and fed billions. They promote life, forge peace, grant power, and can capriciously destroy everything in their path. Even today, rivers remain a powerful global force - one that is more critical than ever to our future. In Rivers of Power, geographer Laurence C. Smith explores the timeless yet underappreciated relationship between rivers and civilization as we know it.

As one of the world’s leading field biologists, George Schaller has spent much of his life traversing wild and isolated places in his quest to understand and conserve threatened species - from mountain gorillas in the Virunga to pandas in the Wolong and snow leopards in the Himalaya. Throughout his celebrated career, Schaller has spent more time in Tibet than in any other part of the world, devoting more than thirty years to the wildlife, culture, and landscapes that captured his heart and continue to compel him.

Wildlife expert and YouTube phenomenon, Coyote Peterson, is back with the sequel to the best-selling Brave Adventures: Wild Animals in a Wild World. Once again, Coyote and his crew voyage to new environments and encounter an even more eclectic ensemble of the planets' animals. From a slimy octopus to elusive tree climbing lizards to nomadic wolverines - this book promises to be another fast-paced, wild experience.

If you learn about the scientific method, you learn that first we hypothesize about something we’ve experienced, and then we look for more of it. This works well enough—but what if you are interested in studying a heretofore unknown comet or supernova? That is the essential problem of the astronomer: the most important discoveries happen without notice! Indeed, as Chris Lintott argues in Accidental Astronomy, luck defines astronomy. Lintott explores the ways in which happenstance shapes how we investigate the sky.

Annie Worsley is a Professor of Environmental Change. A few years ago, she took the plunge and moved to the remote North West Highlands of Scotland. It is a land of unquenchable spirit and severe wildness. In the Highlands, life is ruled by the great elemental forces – light, wind and water hold sway over how land forms, where the sea sits, and what grows. It also dictates how its people live. Annie returns to prehistory to tell the epic story of the Scotland Highlands.

Nature is rife with cheating. Possums play possum, feigning death to cheat predators. Crows cry wolf to scare off rivals. Amphibians and reptiles are inveterate impostors. Even genes and cells cheat. The Liars of Nature and the Nature of Liars explores the evolution of cheating in the natural world, revealing how dishonesty has given rise to wondrous diversity.

Essayist. Preservationist. Mountain man. Inventor. John Muir may be California’s best-known icon. A literary naturalist and founder of the Sierra Club and Yosemite National Park, Muir left his legacy on the landscape and on paper. But the celebrity of John Muir does not tell the whole story. In Essential Muir, for the first time, Muir's selected writings include those that show his ecological vision without ignoring his racism, providing a more complete portrait of the man.

For as long as humans have existed, insects have been our constant companions. Yet we hardly know them, not even the ones we’re closest to: those that eat our food, share our beds, and live in our homes. Organizing his book alphabetically, Hugh Raffles weaves together brief vignettes, meditations, and extended essays, taking the listener on a mesmerizing exploration of history and science, anthropology and travel, economics, philosophy, and popular culture.

Every Living Thing centres on the rivalry pledged between two scientists, Linnaeus and Buffon, who, from 1743 to 1778 raced each other to complete an inventory of all life on Earth. Their focus was on scientific immortality and the core conception of our relationship to the natural world. Their catalogues were starkly different and showed a divergence of opinion on the creation of nature and humanity. Buffon advocating for a natural system of classification, while Linnaeus was dedicated to naming and classifying objects of nature.

John Lister-Kaye has spent a lifetime exploring, protecting and celebrating the British landscape and its wildlife. Lister-Kaye's joyous childhood holidays - spent scrambling through hedges and ditches after birds and small beasts, keeping pigeons in the loft and tracking foxes around the edge of the garden - were the perfect apprenticeship for his two lifelong passions: exploring the wonders of nature and writing about them. Warm, wise and full of wonder, The Dun Cow Rib is a captivating coming of age tale by one of the founding fathers of nature writing.

Why do birds have regional accents? Can horses learn maths? What do animals without eyes see? Questions such as these have fascinated scientists and animal lovers alike long before ethology – the study of animal behaviour – became recognised as a science in the 1970s. Now, as issues of conservation and welfare dominate the field, an understanding of how and why animals act the way they do has become even more critical. In Animal Behaviour, John A. Byers explains the mechanisms and motivations behind a range of animal movements.

Would you be prepared if you needed to survive in the wilderness? Survival expert Creek Stewart shares his cache of practical, easy-to-follow tricks to help you transform everyday items into valuable gear that can save your life. Survival Hacks takes you step-by-step through transforming simple objects like soda tabs and plant leaves into essential survival tools.

Domesticated since the dawn of man, pigeons have been used as crucial communicators in war by every major historical superpower from ancient Egypt to the United States and are credited with saving thousands of lives. They have been worshipped as fertility goddesses and revered as symbols of peace. Charles Darwin relied heavily on pigeons to help formulate and support his theory of evolution. Yet today they are reviled as "rats with wings."

The Last Blue Mountain is the heart-rending true story of the 1957 expedition to Mount Haramosh in the Karakoram range in Pakistan. With the summit beyond reach, four young climbers are about to return to camp. Their brief pause to enjoy the view and take photographs is interrupted by an avalanche which sweeps Bernard Jillott and John Emery hundreds of feet down the mountain into a snow basin. Rae Culbert and Tony Streather risk their own lives to rescue their friends, only to become stranded alongside them.

For the last three billion years or so, life on Earth was shaped by natural forces. Evolution tended to happen slowly, with species crafted across millennia. Then, a few hundred thousand years ago, along came a bolshie, big-brained, bipedal primate we now call Homo sapiens, and with that, the Earth’s natural history came to an abrupt end. We are now living through the post-natural phase, where humans have become the leading force shaping evolution. This audiobook considers the many ways that we’ve altered the DNA of living things and changed the fate of life on earth.

Com a linguagem acessível que caracteriza a obra de Sidarta Ribeiro, este livro propõe combater a desinformação acerca da maconha, mesclando história, cultura e depoimentos pessoais com rigor científico. Em As flores do bem, Ribeiro apresenta um breve histórico da erva milenar e descreve como os feitos coletivos humanos conseguiram domesticar uma planta de incrível versatilidade, cuja história se confunde com a de nossa espécie.

From the swamplands near Bishopville, South Carolina, come reports of a seven-foot-tall, scaly humanoid creature the locals call the “Lizard Man”. Over the years, the creature has been seen by numerous witnesses, including a teenager who claimed it attacked him one night near a remote area called Scape Ore Swamp. The young man’s testimony and physical evidence was so compelling, it not only launched a serious investigation by the local sheriff’s office, but an all-out monster hunt that drew hundreds of people to the small town.

After a chance meeting in the pub, Roger Morgan-Grenville and his friend Duncan decide to take up beekeeping. Their enthusiasm matched only by their ignorance, they are pitched into an arcane world of unexpected challenges. Coping with many setbacks along the way, they manage to create a colony of beehives, finishing two years later with more honey than anyone knows what to do with. By standing back from their normal lives and working with the cycle of the seasons, they emerge with a new-found understanding of nature and a respect for the honeybee and the threats it faces.

Here is the epic story of the centuries-long search to understand the tide: from Aristotle, said to have drowned himself when he failed to figure out the Greek tides, to the pioneering investigations into the role of the moon by Galileo and Newton to supercomputing in our own time.