That rook, named Chicken, has lived with the family ever since - along with a talking magpie named Spike and a crow named Ziki. A blend of memoir and natural history, this book brings Chicken and the others vividly to life.

    He gives us a greater understanding of their lives on planet earth. Adventure, comedy and sadness all intertwine to make these stories hard to put down until the last word.Duration: 5 hours 22 minutesThe stories include:1. Lobo, the King of Carrumpaw2. Silverspot, The Story of a Crow3. Raggylug, the Story of a Cottontail Rabbit4. Bingo, The Story of My Dog5. The Springfield Fox6. The Pacing Mustang7. Wully, The Story of a Yaller Dog8. Redruff, The Story of the Don Valley PartridgeErnest Thompson Seton (1860–1946) was an influential writer, wildlife artist and one of the founders of the Boy Scouts of America.Born in England, raised in Canada, Seton eventually moved to New Mexico and became part of the arts community with Georgia O'Keefe.Always interested in nature, the environment and Indian lore, Seton's literary work was among the first in the genre of modern wild-animal fiction, depicting character with a sense of compassion.

    When he arrived in rehab caked in road grime, he was so badly injured that he could barely perch. But Terry Masear, one of the busiest hummingbird rehabbers in the country, was determined to save this damaged bird, who seemed oddly familiar. During the four months that Terry worked with Gabriel, she took in 160 hummingbirds, from a miniature nestling rescued by a bulldog and a fledgling trapped inside a skydiving wind tunnel at Universal CityWalk, to Pepper, a female Anna’s injured on a film set. In their time together, Pepper and Gabriel form a special bond and, together, with Terry’s help, learn to fly again. Woven around Gabriel’s and Pepper’s stories are those of other colorful birds in this personal narrative filled with the science and magic surrounding these fascinating creatures.

    Study hard, and soon you'll be a first-rate member of Team Owl! This engaging nonfiction picture book is full of vibrant, humorous illustrations and owl lessons that will have readers eagerly practicing their hoots, toe swivels, and alertness (even if they can't grow feathers).

    However, for naturalist and scientist Nick Davies, the call is an invitation to solve an enduring puzzle: how does the cuckoo get away with laying its eggs in the nests of other birds and tricking them into raising young cuckoos rather than their own offspring?Early observers who noticed a little warbler feeding a monstrously large cuckoo chick concluded the cuckoo's lack of parental care was the result of faulty design by the Creator, and that the hosts chose to help the poor cuckoo. These quaint views of bad design and benevolence were banished after Charles Darwin proposed that the cuckoo tricks the hosts in an evolutionary battle, where hosts evolve better defenses against cuckoos and cuckoos, in turn, evolve better trickery to outwit the hosts.For the last three decades, Davies has employed observation and field experiments to unravel the details of this evolutionary "arms race" between cuckoos and their hosts. Like a detective, Davies and his colleagues studied adult cuckoo behavior, cuckoo egg markings, and cuckoo chick begging calls to discover exactly how cuckoos trick their hosts. For birding and evolution aficionados, Cuckoo is a lyrical and scientifically satisfying exploration of one of nature's most astonishing and beautiful adaptations.

    All these and more are portrayed in this enchanting new book by much loved artist Matt Sewell, playing on the theme of collective nouns for animals.Illustrated with Matt’s inimitable watercolours, and imbued with a love of his subjects that will resonate with people everywhere and of all ages, this book is a great gift for nature and art lovers.Accompanying each illustration is a playful, quirky description of each groups' personality that readers cannot help but smile at. Sewell's unique witty take on the subject, and delicately vivid illustrations make for a lovely addition to his collection of pocketable books.

    Sachiko Umoto’s engaging, relaxing techniques include a primer on drawing basics, plus detailed steps for creating animals from start to finish, including deer, sheep, horses, giraffes, dolphins, and more. Learn about essential materials, then discover the best methods for starting and adding onto a drawing, and incorporating shading and color. Sachiko’s instructions are so easy to follow, you’ll be creating a whole menagerie in your sketchbook in no time. Create a marching dog, a sleepy bear, and a bouncy bunny. Trace or copy the designs, then enhance them with unique doodles and details to make them your own. Add color for even more punch. Sachiko’s illustrations will inspire you to incorporate drawings into art journal pages, book art, planners, scrapbooks, and cards. Connect with the world and share your creations with friends and family. Using these techniques, you’ll discover how to:Draw cute character faces that come aliveEasily incorporate details such as fur, patterns, wings, and hornsGet ideas for taking your illustrations further with cute poses and facial expressionsBe inspired by ideas for drawing animals in their surroundingsAdd fun scene-setting extras, such as footprints, food, plants, and moreTake this book with you wherever you, and have fun practicing drawing the cutest animals around. Grab a pencil and get started! Discover how the Illustration School series of books makes drawing enjoyable and stress-free. Using Sachiko Umoto’s fun, easy techniques for sketching quirky animals, plants, landscapes, and people in the Japanese character style, you’ll fill pages with charming illustrations that are uniquely you.

    Phoebe's quest to see as many birds as possible only began at the age of 34, when she first laid eyes on a resplendent Blackburnian Warbler. After her belated awakening to the avian marvels around her, Phoebe began traveling across the globe, to all seven continents, observing and learning as much as she could about the world's thousands of bird species. The intensity and urgency of her quest were quickened when a cancer diagnosis led doctors to give her one year to live. Instead of succumbing to despair, Phoebe pursued her passion and strove to live what remained of her life to its fullest. Miraculously, she defied her death sentence, living on to see more of the world and more new birds for 17 more years. Along the way, she faced other hazards: a brutal assault and rape in New Guinea, a shipwreck, earthquakes, and political upheaval, along with recurrences of malignant melanoma. But in the end she triumphed over adversity and fulfilled her lifelong dream by becoming the first person to see more than 8,000 of the world's birds - a remarkable achievement that required passion, knowledge, skill, dedication, and persistence. Both a lively chronicle of birding adventures and a profoundly moving human document, Birding on Borrowed Time is the memoir of a truly extraordinary woman. The book includes 45 illustrations by renowned avian artist H. Douglas Pratt including 16 full-color plates.

    Not so anymore. All but exterminated, these predators of the not-too-distant past have been reduced to minor players of the modern era. And what of it? Wildlife journalist William Stolzenburg follows in the wake of nature's topmost carnivores, and finds chaos in their absence.From the brazen mobs of deer and marauding raccoons of backyard America to streamsides of Yellowstone National Park crushed by massive herds of elk; from urchin-scoured reefs in the North Pacific to ant-devoured islands in Venezuela, Stolzenburg leads a startling tour through bizarre, impoverished landscapes of pest and plague. For anyone who has seldom given thought to the meat-eating beasts so recently missing from the web of life, here is a world of reason to think again.

    ""One of the outstanding wildlife books of all time.""-New York Herald Tribune First published 1960 by Longmans, Green & Co.

    Now she builds on those insights to show us how to give our animals the best and happiest life—on their terms, not ours.It’s usually easy to pinpoint the cause of physical pain in animals, but to know what is causing them emotional distress is much harder. rawing on the latest research and her own work,Grandin identifies the core emotional needs of animals. Then she explains how to fulfill them for dogs and cats, horses, farm animals, and zoo animals.Whether it’s how to make the healthiest environment for the dog you must leave alone most of the day, how to keep pigs from being bored, or how to know if the lion pacing in the zoo is miserable or just exercising, Grandin teaches us to challenge our assumptions about animal contentment and honor our bond with our fellow creatures.Animals Make Us Human is the culmination of almost thirty years of research, experimentation, and experience.This is essential reading for anyone who’s ever owned, cared for, or simply cared about an animal.

    In thirty-five engaging and sometimes irreverent vignettes, Yow reveals the fascinating lives of the birds we see nearly every day. Following the seasons, he covers forty-two species, discussing the improbable, unusual, and comical aspects of his subjects' lives. Yow offers his own observations, anecdotes, and stories as well as those of America's classic bird writers, such as John James Audubon, Arthur Bent, and Edward Forbush. This unique addition to bird literature combines the fascination of bird life with the pleasure of good reading.

    Bekoff skillfully blends extraordinary stories of animal joy, empathy, grief, embarrassment, anger, and love with the latest scientific research confirming the existence of emotions that common sense and experience have long implied. Filled with Bekoff’s light humor and touching stories, The Emotional Lives of Animals is a clarion call for reassessing both how we view animals and how we treat them.

    A full symphony that swells from the most vocal of more than 350 avian throats representing more than 40 species. “It knocks me out, every day,” she says. Pandemonium, the home and bird sanctuary that Raffin shares with some of  the world’s most remarkable birds, is a conservation organization dedicated to saving and breeding birds at the edge of extinction, with the goal of eventually releasing them into the wild. In The Birds of Pandemonium, she lets us into her world--and theirs. Birds fall in love, mourn, rejoice, and sacrifice; they have a sense of humor, invent, plot, and cope. They can teach us volumes about the interrelationships of humans and animals. Their stories make up the heart of this book. There’s Sweetie, a tiny quail with an outsize personality; the inspiring Oscar, a disabled Lady Gouldian finch who can’t fly but finds a brilliant way to climb to the highest perches of his aviary to roost. The ecstatic reunion of a disabled Victoria crowned pigeon, Wing, and her brother, Coffee, is as wondrous as the silent kinship that develops between Amadeus, a one-legged turaco, and an autistic young visitor. As we come to know the individual birds, we also come to understand how much is at stake for many of these species. One of the aviary’s greatest success stories is breeding the gorgeous green-naped pheasant pigeon, whose home in the New Guinea rainforest is being decimated. Thanks to efforts at Pandemonium, these birds may not share the same fate as the now-extinct dodo.

    White, the author of The Once and Future King and Mistress Masham's Repose, was a young writer who found himself rifling through old handbooks of falconry. A particular sentence — "the bird reverted to a feral state" — seized his imagination, and, White later wrote, "A longing came to my mind that I should be able to do this myself. The word 'feral' has a kind of magical potency which allied itself to two other words, 'ferocious' and 'free.'" Immediately, White wrote to Germany to acquire a young goshawk. Gos, as White named the bird, was ferocious and Gos was free, and White had no idea how to break him in beyond the ancient (and, though he did not know it, long superseded) practice of depriving him of sleep, which meant that he, White, also went without rest. Slowly man and bird entered a state of delirium and intoxication, of attraction and repulsion that looks very much like love. White kept a daybook describing his volatile relationship with Gos — at once a tale of obsession, a comedy of errors, and a hymn to the hawk. It was this that became The Goshawk, one of modern literature's most memorable and surprising encounters with the wilderness — as it exists both within us and without.