Nature
108 Ways to Find More Birds: Surprisingly Effective Secrets to Spotting Birds Everywhere
"Packed with excellent photos and tips, deeply relatable anecdotes, and a palpable sense of joy, this gem of a book will make you a better birder."--Rosemary Mosco, author of A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching
A gorgeously photographed trove of 111 ingenious tips for seeing more birds wherever you are--from crowd favorites (hummingbirds, owls, eagles) to species you've never spotted before Seeing more birds than you ever imagined and witnessing exciting avian drama is possible--whether you're on the go or in your own neighborhood, local park, or backyard. As Heather Wolf explains, it all comes down to how you tune in to the show happening around you, the one in which birds--highly skilled at staying under the radar--are the stars. In Find More Birds, Heather shares her very best tactics--and the jaw-dropping photographs they helped her capture.Plus, special tips point the way to crowd favorites such as hummingbirds, owls, and eagles--and can't-miss bird behaviors. As your senses sharpen and "noticing" becomes second nature, Find More Birds will turn your daily routines into bird-finding adventures, too. Whether you're strolling down the block or parking your car, you never know what will surprise you next!
After the Flower Market
"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.
Animal Liberation Now
THE UPDATED CLASSIC OF THE ANIMAL RIGHTS MOVEMENT, NOW WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY YUVAL NOAH HARARI
"The indispensable foundational text for the movement, new and updated with the honesty and philosophical depth characteristic of all of Singer's work." --J.M. Coetzee, author of The Lives of Animals and Disgrace
"Peter Singer may be the most controversial philosopher alive; he is certainly among the most influential."--The New Yorker
Few books maintain their relevance - and have remained continuously in print - nearly 50 years after they were first published.Animal Liberation, one of TIME's "All-TIME 100 Best Non-Fiction Books" is one such book. Since its original publication in 1975, this groundbreaking work has awakened millions of people to the existence of "speciesism"--our systematic disregard of nonhuman animals--inspiring a worldwide movement to transform our attitudes to animals and eliminate the cruelty we inflict on them. In Animal Liberation Now, Singer exposes the chilling realities of today's "factory farms" and product-testing procedures, destroying the spurious justifications behind them and showing us just how woefully we have been misled.
Now, for the first time since its original publication, Singer returns to the major arguments and examples and brings us to the current moment. This edition, revised from top to bottom, covers important reforms in the European Union, and now in various U.S. states, but on the flip side, Singer shows us the impact of the huge expansion of factory farming due to the exploding demand for animal products in China. Further, meat consumption is taking a toll on the environment, and factory farms pose a profound risk for spreading new viruses even worse than COVID-19.
Animal Liberation Now includes alternatives to what has become a profound environmental and social as well as moral issue. An important and persuasive appeal to conscience, fairness, decency, and justice, it is essential reading for the supporter and the skeptic alike.
Animal: The Definitive Visual 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!
Bird Nests: Amazingly Ingenious and Intricate
Nests--among the most amazing dwelling places in the entire animal kingdom. Few creatures craft such brilliant and involved homes as birds do. From holes drilled into trees to intricately woven cups, these magnificent structures are worthy of our admiration. This book by Stan Tekiela is filled with unparalleled photography, and it promises to delight as it walks you through the world of bird nests.
Book Features
This beautiful, thorough look at bird nests is perfect for anyone who treasures nature.
Bird Trivia: Funny, Strange and Incredible Facts about North American Birds
Award-winning author and wildlife photographer Stan Tekiela presents a fascinating and surprising collection of facts about birds, paired with his full-color photography.
Bird Watcher's Journal (Birding Log Book; Birding Field Diary; Birder Gifts)
Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think
Birds by the Shore: Observing the Natural Life of the Atlantic Coast
Birds of Wisconsin Field Guide (Revised)
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:
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.
Black Diamonds: A Childhood Colored by Coal
--BOOKLIST
In 1855, the landscape painter George Inness began work on his commissioned painting The Lackawanna Valley. A century later, a girl in Scranton, Pennsylvania, looks out over her coal-strewn homeland wishing for beauty and wondering where the artist had stood with his canvas. The interplay between the two stories is at the heart of Catherine Young's memoir Black Diamonds: A Childhood Colored By Coal. Young invites readers into a world now vanished, but which lingers in shimmering portraits. A lyric work of environmental history, Black Diamonds gives voice to the birthplace of the industrial revolution in North America and the consequences for the people and the forgotten valley that once powered the nation.
Book of North American Birds: Book of NA Birds
Book of Vanishing Species: Illustrating the rarest creatures, plants and fungi on Earth
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Our Earth is more beautiful and more diverse than we can possibly conceive of.
Braiding Sweetgrass
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.
Butterflies
Civilian Conservation Corps in Wisconsin: Nature's Army at Work
Compendium of Amazing Gardening Innovations
Conversations with Birds
Creeks Will Rise: People Co-Existing with Floods
Floods are the most frequent and costly in the United States, causing $17 billion annually in damages between 2010 and 2018--and experts predict damages will double by 2051. How should we respond?
Climate change expert Bill Becker argues we should not respond by building more flood-control structures like dams, levees, and seawalls. That was the policy of the last century. The nation's 92,000 dams and 30,000 miles of levees are aging and insufficient to stop the floods we see today. More than 100 million Americans are now at risk.
The Creeks Will Rise: People Coexisting with Floods makes a compelling case that we must begin collaborating with nature. Wherever possible, communities should help flood-prone families move to safer places. We should return the land to rivers and oceans and restore the wetlands, coastal marshes, and other ecosystems that provide natural flood protection.
Becker writes from experience. He helped move a flood-prone community to higher ground forty years ago. He has since worked with scores of flooded communities to help them plan their recoveries.
We must collaborate with nature rather than trying to control it.
Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet
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.
Dahlias: A Little Book of Flowers
This charming little hardcover book includes:
Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test: How Behavior Evolves and Why It Matters
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.
Deepest Map
The dramatic and action-packed story of the last mysterious place on earth--the world's seafloor--and the deep-sea divers, ocean mappers, marine biologists, entrepreneurs, and adventurers involved in the historic push to chart it, as well as the opportunities, challenges, and perils this exploration holds now and for the future.
Five oceans--the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Indian, the Arctic, and the Southern--cover approximately 70 percent of the earth. Yet we know little about what lies beneath them. By the early 2020s, less than twenty-five percent of the ocean's floor has been charted, most close to shorelines, and over three quarters of the ocean lies in in what is called the Deep Sea, depths below a thousand meters. Now, the race is on to completely map the ocean's floor by 2030--an epic project involving scientists, investors, militaries, and private explorers who are cooperating and competing to get an accurate reading of this vast terrain and understand its contours and environment.
In The Deepest Map, Laura Trethewey documents this race to the bottom, following global efforts around the world, from crowdsourcing to advances in technology, recent scientific discoveries to tales of dangerous dives in untested and costly submersibles. The lure of ocean exploration has attracted many, including the likes of James Cameron, Richard Branson, Ray Dalio, and Eric Schmidt. The Deepest Map follows a cast of intriguing characters, from early mappers such as Marie Tharp, a woman working in the male-dominated fields of oceanography and geology whose discoveries have added significantly to our knowledge; Victor Vescovo, a man obsessed with reaching the deepest depths of each of the five oceans, and his young, brilliant, and fearless mapper Cassie Bongiovanni; and the diverse entrepreneurs looking to explore and exploit this uncharted territory and its resources.
In The Deepest Map, ocean discovery converges with humanity's origin story; in mapping the ocean floor, scientists are actively tracing our roots back to the most inhospitable places on earth where life began--and flourished. But for every conservationist looking to protect the seafloor, there are others who see its commercial potential. Will a new map exacerbate pollution and the degradation of this natural resource? How will the race remake political power structures in years to come? Trethewey probes these questions as countries and conglomerates wrestle over the riches that may lie at the bottom of the sea.
The future of humanity depends on our ability to protect this vast, precious, and often ignored resource. A true tale of science, nature, technology, and an extreme outdoor adventure The Deepest Map illuminates why we love--and fear--the earth's final frontier and is a crucial addition to the increasingly urgent conversation about climate change.
Driftless Reader
Fen, Bog and Swamp
*A 2022 NBCC Awards Nonfiction Finalist and a 2023 Phillip D. Reed Environmental Writing Award Finalist* From Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx, this riveting deep dive into the history of our wetlands and what their systematic destruction means for the planet "is both an enchanting work of nature writing and a rousing call to action" (Esquire). "I learned something new--and found something amazing--on every page." --Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See and Cloud Cuckoo Land A lifelong acolyte of the natural world, Annie Proulx brings her witness and research to the subject of wetlands and the vitally important role they play in preserving the environment--by storing the carbon emissions that accelerate climate change. Fens, bogs, swamps, and marine estuaries are crucial to the earth's survival, and in four illuminating parts, Proulx documents their systemic destruction in pursuit of profit. In a vivid and revelatory journey through history, Proulx describes the fens of 16th-century England, Canada's Hudson Bay lowlands, Russia's Great Vasyugan Mire, and America's Okeefenokee National Wildlife Refuge. She introduces the early explorers who launched the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, and writes of the diseases spawned in the wetlands--the Ague, malaria, Marsh Fever. A sobering look at the degradation of wetlands over centuries and the serious ecological consequences, this is "an unforgettable and unflinching tour of past and present, fixed on a subject that could not be more important" (Bill McKibben). "A stark but beautifully written Silent Spring-style warning from one of our greatest novelists." --The Christian Science Monitor