Nature

Aimed at outdoor adventurers ages six and up, the Adventure Notebook features more than 20 ways to creatively explore the outdoors. Entertaining year-round activities help kids learn how to plan their own adventures, take care of themselves in the wild, and discover new skills--from map-making and knot-tying to identifying animal tracks and nighttime constellations.

A range of adventures are organized for Exploration (such as collecting natural treasures), Creation (making and cooking with a campfire), Knowledge (what to pack), and Play (hide-and-seek geocaching). Clear instructions, including full-color photos and informative illustrations, guide readers through each activity, step-by-step, while tips throughout encourage parents to get involved with their kids outdoors. Blank journaling pages inspire kids to record each adventure through words and art: at the end of the book, they will have a colorful and unique family keepsake!

Whether playing in the backyard, hiking a nearby trail, or visiting a national park, this fun-filled guide inspires kids to get outside and explore the great outdoors.

A celebration of nature's spectacular lightshows, and a visual feast documenting the kaleidoscopic colors that decorate the sky.

For millennia, humans have been fascinated with the ghostly green and red curtains of light that shimmer across the heavens on dark, clear nights. Ancient peoples saw these displays as souls of the dead, the torches of the spirits and as harbingers of war. Barely 100 years ago, scientists finally learned that an aurora is created when the Earth's magnetic field is bombarded with charged particles from the sun. When the charged particles collide with oxygen in the atmosphere, auroras with yellows, greens and reds appear. Collisions with nitrogen result in bluish colors. However, our understanding of the physics behind auroras has not detracted from their wonder.

Auroras is filled with 80 photographs of one of nature's greatest spectacles, complete with captions that reflect on the folklore, science and beauty of the northern lights. The book poses and answers the many scientific questions about auroras:

Auroras is where cutting-edge science meets the stuff of dreams.

A stunning collection of 200 bird species painted by the world-renowned wildlife painter.

"Robert Bateman's paintings and drawings... reveal a vision of the beautiful and stark possibilities of the natural world. They are compelling and haunting."
-- The Washington Post

At a time when bird species are disappearing rapidly, the poignant beauty of Robert Bateman's paintings is more urgent than ever. It reminds us why Bateman was compelled to study and paint his subjects and why we must work to secure their futures.

Bateman has sketched and painted bird life in every corner of the globe. His special relationship with some of the planet's most beautiful and fascinating creatures is captured here in an elegant volume that will appeal to bird lovers and art lovers alike.

The paintings are organized variously into 20 groups: At Home on Salt Spring Island; In the Pribilofs; Treeline and Tundra; Above Larch Valley; A Wenatchee Field Trip; Canyons and Deserts of Arizona; The Great Plains; Spring on the Great Lakes; Immigrants; Eastern Fields and Forests; On Inland Waters; The Atlantic Coast; In the Everglades; The Tropical Americas; The Galápagos; Old Worlds; At the Taj Mahal; A Visit to Bharatpur; The African Savannah and To the Antarctic.

Bateman's magnificent works celebrate the breathtaking range of bird life on Earth -- from the spectacular plumage of the fiery rainforest quetzel to the threatening glare of the golden eagle. And through his notes, informative diary entries and detailed sketches and studies, he shares with the reader a wealth of observations about the birds' behavior and his keen appreciation of their beauty. As the great Roger Tory Peterson said, "If I could paint like another wildlife artist, it would be Robert Bateman."

Robert Bateman began his lifelong education as an artist, naturalist and birder in the tree-filled ravine behind his boyhood home in Toronto. There he would study and sketch the birds he saw, adding them to the life list he keeps to this day. Robert has an enormous following, and his original artwork and limited edition prints are sought by collectors the world over. In 2003, the Robert Bateman Centre museum opened in Victoria, B.C. Today he lives with his wife, Birgit, and his family on one of the Gulf Islands off Canada's western coast.

** A Winner of the Woodland Books of the Year Award **

In a stressful, chaotic world, many of us are turning to nature for a sense of serenity and happiness.

While the idea of the wild outdoors is enticing, though, our busy lives and our location can cause us to become detached from nature. Down to the River and Up to the Trees will show you how to connect with the natural world around you, whether you live in the city or the countryside.

From getting to know the local wildlife, to foraging and creating naturally-sourced masterpieces, Down to the River is brimming with practical information, intriguing quotes and inspirational ideas. Discover how to carve your own spoon; to be able to tell if the moon is waxing or waning; or try forest bathing (surrounding yourself with trees). Learn how to make yourself at home amongst the animals and plants on your doorstep, in harmony with your surroundings. There is space too for you to record your thoughts and findings, whatever shape they take.

Longlisted for an Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence
A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year

America's national parks are breathing spaces in a world in which such spaces are steadily disappearing, which is why more than 300 million people visit the parks each year. Now Terry Tempest Williams, the New York Times bestselling author of the environmental classic Refuge and the beloved memoir When Women Were Birds, returns with The Hour of Land, a literary celebration of our national parks and an exploration of what they mean to us and what we mean to them.

From the Grand Tetons in Wyoming to Acadia in Maine to Big Bend in Texas, Williams creates a series of lyrical portraits that illuminate the unique grandeur of each place while delving into what it means to shape a landscape with its own evolutionary history into something of our own making. Part memoir, part natural history, and part social critique, The Hour of Land is a meditation and a manifesto on why wild lands matter to the soul of America.

Incredible Wild Edibles covers 36 of the best edible wild plants in North America: fruits, berries, nuts, shoots, leafy greens, root vegetables, culinary herbs, teas, and syrups that boast exceptional flavor and nutrition. The plants chosen represent every habitat and every region in North America, from the northern forests to the southwest deserts, from the largest cities to the wildest mountains. Rather than cover hundreds of species in brief accounts that leave the reader unsure of how to proceed, Samuel Thayer encourages readers to thoroughly learn one plant at a time. Each of these traditional foods has a rich culinary and cultural history--a wholesome past that is still relevant for our health and happiness today. The text is fully accessible to the novice, but remains botanically accurate and has the in-depth information that seasoned foragers crave.

Sharing the wisdom of a lifetime of daily foraging, the author answers all of the reader's questions about each plant: How do I identify it? What might I confuse it with? Where can I find it? What part do I use, and when is it ready to be picked? How do I gather and prepare it? How can I be sure to harvest it responsibly? This discussion is accompanied by more than 350 color photos showing all the key features for identification, including potentially confusing species. Photos also depict the exact parts to use and the proper stage for collection. All of this is delivered in a familiar but authoritative tone, along with humorous anecdotes and insights from extensive real-life experience with each plant covered in the book.

Incredible Wild Edibles contains an index, bibliography, illustrated glossary, range maps, and foraging calendar. This third volume in Thayer's Forager's Harvest series has no overlap of the plants covered in the first two volumes.

Continuing his groundbreaking examination of our "Anthropocene Epoch," which he began with The Social Conquest of Earth, described by the New York Times as "a sweeping account of the human rise to domination of the biosphere," here Wilson posits that we, as a species, now know enough about the universe and ourselves that we can begin to approach questions about our place in the cosmos and the meaning of intelligent life in a systematic, indeed, in a testable way.

Once criticized for a purely mechanistic view of human life and an overreliance on genetic predetermination, Wilson presents in The Meaning of Human Existence his most expansive and advanced theories on the sovereignty of human life, recognizing that, even though the human and the spider evolved similarly, the poet's sonnet is wholly different from the spider's web. Whether attempting to explicate "The Riddle of the Human Species," "Free Will," or "Religion"; warning of "The Collapse of Biodiversity"; or even creating a plausible "Portrait of E.T.," Wilson does indeed believe that humanity holds a special position in the known universe.

The human epoch that began in biological evolution and passed into pre-, then recorded, history is now more than ever before in our hands. Yet alarmed that we are about to abandon natural selection by redesigning biology and human nature as we wish them, Wilson soberly concludes that advances in science and technology bring us our greatest moral dilemma since God stayed the hand of Abraham.

Among all the technological accomplishments of the last century, none has captured our imagination more deeply than the movement of humans into outer space. From Sputnik to SpaceX, the story of that journey is told as never before in The Penguin Book of Outer Space Exploration.

Renowned space historian John Logsdon traces the greatest moments in human spaceflight by weaving together essential, fascinating documents from NASA's history with his expert narrative guidance. Beginning with rocket genius Wernher von Braun's vision for voyaging to Mars, and closing with Elon Musk's contemporary plan to get there, this volume traces major events like the founding of NASA, the first American astronauts in space, the moon landings, the Challenger disaster, the daring Hubble Telescope repairs, and more. In these pages, we find such gems as Eisenhower's reactions to Sputnik, the original NASA astronaut application, John Glenn's reflections on zero gravity, Kennedy's directives to go to the moon, discussions on what Neil Armstrong's first famous first words should be, customs forms filled out by astronauts bringing back moon rocks, transcribed conversations with Nixon on ending Project Apollo and beginning the space shuttle program, and so much more.