Showing titles in Outdoors & Nature

Ancient woods are Britain's richest habitats: rare fragments of our landscape that teem with life from soil to canopy. They live in our collective imagination as quiet places, best left pristine and untouched. But their story has always been one of interdependence with people. Now, as ever...

In Beauty of the Beasts, Jo Wimpenny challenges our perceptions of 'good' species and sets the record straight about those we label 'pests', 'scavengers' and 'predators'. While it may be tempting to imagine a more pleasant world devoid of animals that scare and repulse us, Jo explains why losing them would devastate many ecosystems, encouraging all of us to appreciate these animals for what they are and the vital roles they fulfil for all life on Earth.

Brought to you by Penguin. A final posthumous work from the beloved conservationist and naturalist Gerald Durrell, to celebrate the centenary of his birth, with a new foreword written by HRH Princess Anne. Myself and Other Animals is a new book mosaicked from unpublished autobiographies...

In this New York Times best seller, a naturalist probes the forest to comprehend the secret lives of owls. Leigh Calvez takes listeners on an adventure into the world of owls: owl-watching, avian science, and the deep forest - often in the dead of night. These birds are a bit mysterious, and that's part of what makes them so fascinating.

The third collection of memoirs from the author who inspired the TV series All Creatures Great and Small. Training as an RAF pilot in the smoke and bustle of wartime London is a far cry from James Herriot’s day job as a country vet in the Yorkshire Dales. And whilst he is keen to serve King...

In 1908, near Folsom, New Mexico, a cowboy discovered the remains of a herd of extinct giant bison. By examining flint points embedded in the bones, archeologists later determined that a band of humans had killed and butchered the animals 12,450 years ago. This discovery vastly expanded America's known human history but also revealed the long-standing danger Homo sapiens presented to the continent's evolutionary richness. Distinguished scholar Dan Flores's ambitious history chronicles the epoch in which humans and animals have coexisted in the "wild new world" of North America.

A luminous collection of essays exploring the lessons we can incorporate from the animal world in order to live more fully as humans A shelter cat teaches us that our damaged parts, too, are worthy of love... a captive orca shows us that inconvenience and difficulties are the blessing of a full...

Following on from her examination of the weird and wonderful animal kingdom, this second season of Earpedia sees comedian Sue Perkins presenting a series of audio guides to the planet's most useful, bizarre and interesting plants.

Can you recognise the cheerful chirrups of the house sparrow? A song thrush singing out at winter's darkest hour? Or the beautiful, haunting call of the curlew? At a time of great anxiety and uncertainty, while coping with the untimely death of his mother, Charlie Corbett realised his perspective on life was slipping. In a moment of despair, he found himself - somewhat damp - lying on the side of a lonely hill staring up at a leaden sky, a melancholy drizzle seeping into his bones.

Our human psyches possess astonishing resources that wait within us, but we might not even know they exist until we discover how to access them and cultivate their powers, their untapped potentials and depths. Wild Mind identifies these resources - which Bill Plotkin calls the four facets of the self, or the four dimensions of our innate human wholeness - and also the four sets of fragmented or wounded subpersonalities that form during childhood. 

Naturalist Craig Childs's "utterly memorable and fantastic" study of the desert's dangerous beauty is based on years of adventures in the deserts of the American West (Washington Post). Like the highest mountain peaks, deserts are environments that can be inhospitable even to the most seasoned...

Gilles Fonteneau, a longtime colleague of the legendary Jacques Cousteau's Calypso team, fulfilled a lifelong dream when in 2001 he launched his own exploration, aboard the 45-foot catamaran Prince de Vendee, into the silent world of the sea. Little did he know when he set out that his efforts to better understand the dynamics of the tectonic plates of the region would have such worldwide significance, as shown by the tsunami disaster of southeast Asia in December 2004.

With his distinctively witty, anecdotal, and disarming voice, John Yow now journeys to the shore and shares his encounters with some of the most familiar and beloved coastal birds. Out of his travels—from North Carolina's Outer Banks, down the Atlantic coast, and westward along the Gulf of Mexico—come colorful accounts of twenty-eight species, from ubiquitous beach birds like sanderlings and laughing gulls to wonders of nature like roseate spoonbills and the American avocets.

We live at the bottom of an ocean of air - 5,200 million million tons, to be exact. It sounds like a lot, but Earth’s atmosphere is smeared onto its surface in an alarmingly thin layer - 99 percent contained within 18 miles. Yet, within this fragile margin lies a magnificent realm - at once gorgeous, terrifying, capricious, and elusive. With his keen eye for identifying and uniting seemingly unrelated events, Chris Dewdney reveals to us the invisible rivers in the sky that affect how our weather works and the structure of clouds and storms and seasons, the rollercoaster of climate.

When Stephen Bodio was a young boy in the early '50s, he saw an image in National Geographic that became forever etched in his mind: It was a photograph of a Kazakh nomad, dressed in a long coat and wearing a fur hat, holding a huge tame eagle on his fist. And a lifelong fascination with Central Asia was born.

Every cow just wants to be happy. Every chicken just wants to be free. Every bear, dog, or mouse experiences sorrow and feels pain as intensely as any of us humans do. In a compelling appeal to reason and human kindness, Matthieu Ricard here takes the arguments from his best sellers Altruism and Happiness to their logical conclusion: Compassion toward all beings, including our fellow animals, is a moral obligation and the direction toward which any enlightened society must aspire.

Few books have captured the haunting world of music and rivers and of the sport they provide as well as A River Never Sleeps. Roderick L. Haig-Brown writes of fishing not just as a sport, but also as an art. He knows moving water and the life within it - its subtlest mysteries and perpetual delights. He is a man who knows fish lore as few people ever will, and the legends and history of a great sport. Month by month, he takes you from river to river, down at last to the saltwater and the sea.

In 1929, Edwin Hubble announced the greatest discovery in the history of astronomy since Galileo first turned a telescope to the heavens. The galaxies, previously believed to float serenely in the void, are in fact hurtling apart at an incredible speed: the universe is expanding. This stunning discovery was the culmination of a decades-long arc of scientific and technical advancement.

For the first time, His Royal Highness Charles, the Prince of Wales, shares his views on how mankind’s most pressing modern challenges are rooted in our disharmony with nature. In the vein of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and Van Jones’ Green Collar Economy, Prince Charles presents the...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Inheritors of the Earth by Chris D. Thomas, read by Leighton Pugh. THE TIMES, ECONOMIST AND GUARDIAN BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2017 It is accepted wisdom today that human beings have irrevocably damaged the natural world. We have altered our climate, acidified...