Nature

"These surprisingly beautiful images of growth and decay are like a meditation, an invitation to consider transience and joy." --Harper's Bazaar

Photographer Johanna Neurath visited Columbia Road Market in London nearly every Sunday for ten years. Rather than depicting the obvious prettiness of people and their flowers Neurath turns her attention to the colors and patterns left behind as the market clears out. This book fuses still life and street photography and reminds us that beauty is often to be found in the most unexpected places.

Johanna Neurath is Design Director at Thames & Hudson. A self-confessed image junkie, type nerd, and bibliophile, Neurath has worked in publishing for more than twenty-five years as a book designer, picture editor, typographer, and commissioning editor.

This landmark photographic encyclopedia of the animal kingdom is revised with new species, images, and the latest scientific knowledge on all things animal!

DK's Animal features stunning wildlife photography of more than 2,000 of the world's most important wild mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, insects, and other invertebrates, written by 70 natural history specialists. Each animal species comes with a description, photo, distribution map, and statistics, including its conservation status.

Whilst also explaining animal biology in beautiful visual detail, Animal contains a chapter of portraits of the different types of environments that animals inhabit. For anyone who wants a reliable and enthralling reference, in which you can find the answers to everything - from why zebras are striped to how the sunbear got its name - this awe-inspiring animal book is your go-to guide!

Step inside the pages of this amazing animal encyclopedia:

- A visual catalog containing descriptions of over 2,000 animal species, with distribution maps and striking photos.
- The catalog is organized into taxa (the groups of related species that scientists use to classify animals). Each taxon has an introduction explaining which animals belong to the group and what they have in common.
- Researched, written, and authenticated by a team of over 70 zoologists and naturalists from around the globe.
- Introductory chapter describes animal biology in beautiful visual detail.
- Habitats chapter provides visual portraits of the different types of environments that animals inhabit.

A must-have volume for animal lovers of all ages, whether you're a habitual viewer of wildlife documentaries, or an enthusiastic visitor of zoos and safari parks, Animal has something for everyone to explore and love, and is sure to delight!

Award-winning author and wildlife photographer Stan Tekiela presents a fascinating and surprising collection of facts about birds, paired with his full-color photography.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Genius of Birds, a radical investigation into the bird way of being, and the recent scientific research that is dramatically shifting our understanding of birds -- how they live and how they think.

"There is the mammal way and there is the bird way." But the bird way is much more than a unique pattern of brain wiring, and lately, scientists have taken a new look at bird behaviors they have, for years, dismissed as anomalies or mysteries -- What they are finding is upending the traditional view of how birds conduct their lives, how they communicate, forage, court, breed, survive. They are also revealing the remarkable intelligence underlying these activities, abilities we once considered uniquely our own: deception, manipulation, cheating, kidnapping, infanticide, but also ingenious communication between species, cooperation, collaboration, altruism, culture, and play.

Some of these extraordinary behaviors are biological conundrums that seem to push the edges of, well, birdness: a mother bird that kills her own infant sons, and another that selflessly tends to the young of other birds as if they were her own; a bird that collaborates in an extraordinary way with one species--ours--but parasitizes another in gruesome fashion; birds that give gifts and birds that steal; birds that dance or drum, that paint their creations or paint themselves; birds that build walls of sound to keep out intruders and birds that summon playmates with a special call--and may hold the secret to our own penchant for playfulness and the evolution of laughter.

Drawing on personal observations, the latest science, and her bird-related travel around the world, from the tropical rainforests of eastern Australia and the remote woodlands of northern Japan, to the rolling hills of lower Austria and the islands of Alaska's Kachemak Bay, Jennifer Ackerman shows there is clearly no single bird way of being. In every respect, in plumage, form, song, flight, lifestyle, niche, and behavior, birds vary. It is what we love about them. As E.O Wilson once said, when you have seen one bird, you have not seen them all.

Get the New Edition of Wisconsin's Best-Selling Bird Guide

Learn to identify birds in Wisconsin, and make bird-watching even more enjoyable. With Stan Tekiela's famous field guide, bird identification is simple and informative. There's no need to look through dozens of photos of birds that don't live in your area. This book features 121 species of Wisconsin birds organized by color for ease of use. Do you see a yellow bird and don't know what it is? Go to the yellow section to find out.

Book Features:

121 species: Only Wisconsin birds

Simple color guide: See a yellow bird? Go to the yellow section

Compare feature: Decide between look-alikes

Stan's Notes: Naturalist tidbits and facts

Professional photos: Crisp, stunning full-page images

This new edition includes more species, updated photographs and range maps, revised information, and even more of Stan's expert insights. So grab Birds of Wisconsin Field Guide for your next birding adventure--to help ensure that you positively identify the birds that you see.

The Book of North American Birds is a beautifully illustrated and comprehensive guide to more than 6000 species of birds that spend at least part of the year on the North American continent.

More than any other kind of wildlife, birds have an almost magical hold on the human imagination. They are beautiful, vibrantly alive, and seen everywhere. They open our eyes to the world of nature and enrich our spirits with their color, their music, and their wondrous gift of flight. The BOOK OF NORTH AMERICAN BIRDS celebrates the hundreds of species that spend at least part of the year in the United States or Canada. It includes some 600 species in all and the 8 chapters are organized by type and habitat. Each page features a full-color painting, usually of a male in breeding plumage, since the male is more colorful than the female, accompanied by a brief narrative focusing on key aspects of the bird in the wild. At the bottom of each page is information for quick reference, with details on identification, habitat, nesting, and food. In addition, a drawing highlights a particular point of interest about the species, and a color-coded range map showing where it can be found. Praise from Roger Tory Peterson highlights the back cover of this volume. The illustrations and paintings are from some of the most renowned wildlife artists in the field, such as H. Douglas Pratt, Ray Harris-Ching, and Albert Earl Gilbert.

Fun to read, easy to use, informative, and lovely to look at--here is the perfect book for anyone who loves nature.

A New York Times Bestseller
A Washington Post Bestseller
Named a "Best Essay Collection of the Decade" by Literary Hub

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on "a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise" (Elizabeth Gilbert).

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings--asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass--offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

Between 1933 and 1942, the Civilian Conservation Corps, a popular New Deal relief program, was at work across America. During the Great Depression, young men lived in rustic CCC camps planting trees, cutting trails, and reversing the effects of soil erosion. In his latest book, acclaimed environmental writer Jerry Apps presents the first comprehensive history of the CCC in Wisconsin. Apps guides readers around the state, from the Northwoods to the Driftless Area, creating a map of where and how more than 125 CCC camps left indelible marks on the landscape. Captured in rich detail as well are the voices of the CCC boys who by preserving Wisconsin's natural beauty not only discovered purpose in their labor, but founded an enduring legacy of environmental stewardship.

"Birds are my almanac. They tune me into the seasons, and into myself."So begins this lively collection of essays by acclaimed filmmaker and novelist Priyanka Kumar. Growing up at the feet of the Himalayas in northern India, Kumar took for granted her immersion in a lush natural world. After moving to North America as a teenager, she found herself increasingly distanced from more than human life and discouraged by the civilization she saw contributing to its destruction. It was only in her twenties, living in Los Angeles and working on films, that she began to rediscover her place in the landscape--and in the cosmos--by way of watching birds.Tracing her movements across the American West, this stirring collection of essays brings the avian world richly to life. Kumar's perspective is not that of a list keeper, counting and cataloguing species. Rather, from the mango-colored western tanager that rescues her from a bout of altitude sickness in Sequoia National Park to ancient sandhill cranes in the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, and from the snowy plovers building shallow nests with bits of shell and grass to the white-breasted nuthatch that regularly visits the apricot tree behind her family's casita in Santa Fe, for Kumar, birds "become a portal to a more vivid, enchanted world."At a time when climate change, habitat loss, and the reckless use of pesticides are causing widespread extinction of species, Kumar's reflections on these messengers from our distant past and harbingers of our future offer luminous evidence of her suggestion that "seeds of transformation lie dormant in all of our hearts. Sometimes it just takes the right bird to awaken us."

Some 40 million miles of roadways encircle the earth, yet we tend to regard them only as infrastructure for human convenience. While roads are so ubiquitous they're practically invisible to us, wild animals experience them as entirely alien forces of death and disruption. In Crossings, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb travels throughout the United States and around the world to investigate how roads have transformed our planet. A million animals are killed by cars each day in the U.S. alone, but as the new science of road ecology shows, the harms of highways extend far beyond roadkill. Creatures from antelope to salmon are losing their ability to migrate in search of food and mates; invasive plants hitch rides in tire treads; road salt contaminates lakes and rivers; and the very noise of traffic chases songbirds from vast swaths of habitat.

Yet road ecologists are also seeking to blunt the destruction through innovative solutions. Goldfarb meets with conservationists building bridges for California's mountain lions and tunnels for English toads, engineers deconstructing the labyrinth of logging roads that web national forests, animal rehabbers caring for Tasmania's car-orphaned wallabies, and community organizers working to undo the havoc highways have wreaked upon American cities.

Today, as our planet's road network continues to grow exponentially, the science of road ecology has become increasingly vital. Written with passion and curiosity, Crossings is a sweeping, spirited, and timely investigation into how humans have altered the natural world--and how we can create a better future for all living beings.

For centuries, people have been returning to the same tired nature-versus-nurture debate, trying to determine what we learn and what we inherit. In Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test, biologist Marlene Zuk goes beyond the binary and instead focuses on interaction, or the way that genes and environment work together. Driving her investigation is a simple but essential question: How does behavior evolve?

Drawing from a wealth of research, including her own on insects, Zuk answers this question by turning to a wide range of animals and animal behavior. There are stories of cockatoos that dance to rock music, ants that heal their injured companions, dogs that exhibit signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and so much more.

For insights into animal intelligence, mating behavior, and an organism's ability to fight disease, she explores the behavior of smart spiders, silent crickets, and crafty crows. In each example, she clearly demonstrates how these traits were produced by the complex and diverse interactions of genes and the environment and urges us to consider how that same process evolves behavior in us humans.

Filled with delightful anecdotes and fresh insights, Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test helps us see both other animals and ourselves more clearly, demonstrating that animal behavior can be remarkably similar to human behavior, and wonderfully complicated in its own right.

Ancient glaciers passed by the Driftless Area and waterways vein its interior, forming an enchanting, enigmatic landscape of sharp ridgetops and deep valleys. Across time, this rugged topography has been home to an astonishing variety of people: Sauk, Dakota, and Ho-Chunk villagers, Norwegian farmers and Mexican mercado owners, Dominican nuns and Buddhist monks, river raftsmen and Shakespearean actors, Cornish miners and African American barn builders, organic entrepreneurs and Hmong truck gardeners.

The Driftless Reader gathers writings that highlight the unique natural and cultural history, landscape, and literature of this region that encompasses southwestern Wisconsin and adjacent Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois. The more than eighty selected texts include writings by Black Hawk, Mark Twain, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Frank Lloyd Wright, Aldo Leopold, David Rhodes, and many other Native people, explorers, scientists, historians, farmers, songwriters, journalists, and poets. Paintings, photographs, maps, and other images complement the texts, providing a deeper appreciation of this region's layered natural and human history.

Highlights include excerpts and art from:

Carol Ryrie Brink

William Cronon

John T. Curtis

August Derleth

Richard Eberhart

Fabu

Hamlin Garland

Pedro Guerrero

Hoowaneka (Little Elk)

Juliet Kinzie

Patty Loew

Ben Logan

Truman Lowe

Jacques Marquette

Ken McCullough

Edna Meudt

Mountain Wolf Woman

Zebulon Pike

Henry Schoolcraft

Clifford D. Simak

Wallace Stegner

Pearl Swiggum

Frank Utpatel

Mark Wunderlich