Many people think of microbes as germs to be eradicated, but those that live with us—the microbiome—build our bodies, protect our health, shape our identities, and grant us incredible abilities. In this astonishing book, Ed Yong takes us on a grand tour through our microbial partners, and introduces us to the scientists on the front lines of discovery. Yong, whose humor is as evident as his erudition, prompts us to look at ourselves and our animal companions in a new light—less as individuals and more as the interconnected, interdependent multitudes we assuredly are. The microbes in our bodies are part of our immune systems and protect us from disease. Those in cows and termites digest the plants they eat. In the deep oceans, mysterious creatures without mouths or guts depend on microbes for all their energy. Bacteria provide squids with invisibility cloaks, help beetles to bring down forests, and allow worms to cause diseases that afflict millions of people. I Contain Multitudes is the story of these extraordinary partnerships, between the creatures we are familiar with and those we are not. It reveals how we humans are disrupting these partnerships and how we might manipulate them for our own good. It will change both our view of nature and our sense of where we belong in it.

    Passing his days covertly watching birds, he was unaware that he, too, was being watched. Peter Conder, also a passionate ornithologist, had noticed Buxton gazing skywards. He approached him and, with two other prisoners, they founded a secret birdwatching society.This is the untold story of an obsessive quest behind barbed wire. Through their shared love of birds, the four PoWs overcame hunger, hardship, fear and stultifying boredom. Their quest would draw in not only their fellow prisoners, but also some of the German guards, at great risk to them all.Derek Niemann draws on original diaries, letters and drawings, to show how Conder, Barrett, Waterston and Buxton were forged by their wartime experience into the giants of postwar wildlife conservation. Their legacy lives on.

    In an unexpectedly zany adventure that took the author the equivalent of 3.3 times around the world, the result is a tale of theft, wartime atrocities, insane millionaires, intrigue in the Middle East, and skinny dipping.The Labrador Duck is often mentioned in the same breath as the Passenger Pigeon, the Dodo, and the Great Auk—great species that once roamed the planet. The Labrador Duck became extinct somewhere around 1875. It is the most enigmatic bird in North America, partially because it bred so far north that no record exists of its breeding, and partially because it became extinct almsot before we noted it was in decline. The Curse of the Labrador Duck chronicles Chilton's adventures while attempting to examine every stuffed specimen of the species, do genetic analysis of every Labrador Duck egg, and visit every North American site where the duck was shot.When Chilton began his investigation, there were thought to be about fifty specimens scattered amongst the museums of Europe, North America, and the Middle East. However, as his study advanced, it was clear that some specimens had been lost to war and theft, and others were secreted away in far-flung collections overseen by miserly curators. After travelling the equivalent of more than three times around the world, Chilton was able to examine what amounted to fifty-five specimens in total, although one turned out to be a forgery and several others had been tampered with by unscrupulous taxidermists. Regrettably, genetic analysis showed that none of the eggs attributed to the Labrador Duck were genuine, even those that had escaped the bombing of Dresden. On the positive side, the author earned numerous hangovers, swam naked in a glacier-fed stream, dined with Russian gangsters, and was able to narrowly avoid arrest in New York City.

    A concise atlas of anatomy, it contains more than 200 specially prepared accurate and clear drawings that include material never illustrated before. The text is as informative as the drawings; written at a level appropriate to undergraduate students and to bird lovers in general, it discusses why birds look and act the way they do.Designed to supplement a basic ornithology textbook, the Manual of Ornithology covers systematics and evolution, topography, feathers and flight, the skeleton and musculature, and the digestive, circulatory, respiratory, excretory, reproductive, sensory, and nervous systems of birds, as well as field techniques for watching and studying birds. Each chapter concludes with a list of key references for the topic covered, with a comprehensive bibliography at the end of the volume. The book will be a guide and reference for every level of bird study—a basic tool for investigation for anyone curious about the fascinating world of birds.

    But in recent decades, these claims have eroded, or even been disproven outright, by a revolution in the study of animal cognition. Take the way octopuses use coconut shells as tools; elephants that classify humans by age, gender, and language; or Ayumu, the young male chimpanzee at Kyoto University whose flash memory puts that of humans to shame. Based on research involving crows, dolphins, parrots, sheep, wasps, bats, whales, and of course chimpanzees and bonobos, Frans de Waal explores both the scope and the depth of animal intelligence. He offers a firsthand account of how science has stood traditional behaviorism on its head by revealing how smart animals really are, and how we’ve underestimated their abilities for too long.People often assume a cognitive ladder, from lower to higher forms, with our own intelligence at the top. But what if it is more like a bush, with cognition taking different forms that are often incomparable to ours? Would you presume yourself dumber than a squirrel because you’re less adept at recalling the locations of hundreds of buried acorns? Or would you judge your perception of your surroundings as more sophisticated than that of a echolocating bat? De Waal reviews the rise and fall of the mechanistic view of animals and opens our minds to the idea that animal minds are far more intricate and complex than we have assumed. De Waal’s landmark work will convince you to rethink everything you thought you knew about animal—and human—intelligence.

    Birds of North America By Chandler S Robbins, Bertel Bruun, and Herbert S Zim, Illustrated By Arthur Singer - Golden Press New York Western Publishing Company Inc - Copyright 1966 By Western Publishing Company Inc - Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 66-16454 - 340 Pages - ISBN 0307136566 - 13656 - Robbins, Bruun, Zim, Singer - Golden A Guide to Field Identification - Quick Guide to Major Families - Loons, Grebes, Albatrosses and Petrels, Geese, Surface Ducks, Bay and Sea Ducks, Hawks and Eagles, Grouse, Quail, Herons, Rails and Coots, Plovers, Sandpipers, Gulls and Terns, Alcids, Pigeons and Doves, Cuckoos, Owls, Swifts, Hummingbirds, Woodpeckers, Flycatchers, Swallows, Jays and Crows, Chickadees and Titmice, Nuthatches and Creepers, Wrens, Thrashers, Thrushes and Bluebirds, Kinglets, Vireos, Warblers, Blackbirds and Orioles, Finches, Sparrows - Table of Contents - How to Use This Book - Loons, Grebes, Tubenoses, Pelicans and Allies, Waterfowl, Vultures Hawks and Falcons, Gallinaceous Birds, Herons and Allies, Canes and Allies, Shorebirds Gulls and Alcids, Pigeons and Doves, Cuckoos Anis and Roadrunners, Owls, Goatsuckers, Swifts and Hummingbirds, Parrots, Trogons, Kingfishers, Woodpeckers, Perching Birds, Bibliography, Index

    Then, in the 20th century, an incredible turnaround took place. Conservationists outlawed commercial hunting, created wildlife sanctuaries, transplanted isolated species to restored habitats and imposed regulations on hunters and trappers. Over decades, they slowly nursed many wild populations back to health.            But after the Second World War something happened that conservationists hadn’t foreseen: sprawl. People moved first into suburbs on urban edges, and then kept moving out across a landscape once occupied by family farms. By 2000, a majority of Americans lived in neither cities nor country but in that vast in-between. Much of sprawl has plenty of trees and its human residents offer up more and better amenities than many wild creatures can find in the wild: plenty of food, water, hiding places, and protection from predators with guns. The result is a mix of people and wildlife that should be an animal-lover’s dream-come-true but often turns into a sprawl-dweller’s nightmare.Nature Wars offers an eye-opening look at how  Americans lost touch with the natural landscape, spending 90 percent of their time indoors where nature arrives via television, films and digital screens in which wild creatures often behave like people or cuddly pets.  All the while our well-meaning efforts to protect animals allowed wild populations to burgeon out of control, causing damage costing billions, degrading ecosystems, and touching off disputes that polarized communities, setting neighbor against neighbor. Deeply researched, eloquently written, counterintuitive and often humorous Nature Wars will be the definitive book on how we created this unintended mess.

    Accompanying every species entry is a distribution map and illustrations showing the species in all the major plumages (male, female, immature, in flight, at rest, feeding: whatever is important).In addition, each group of birds includes an introduction which covers the major problems involved in identifying or observing them: how to organise a sea watching trip, how to separate birds of prey in flight, which duck hybrids can be confused with which main species. These and many other common birdwatching questions are answered.The combination of definitive text, up-to-date distribution maps and superb illustrations, all in a single volume, makes this book the ultimate field guide, essential on every bookshelf and birdwatching trip.

    Using the latest aerial surveillance, state-of-the-art cameras, and high definition technology, the creators of Planet Earth have assembled more than 400 stunning photographs of wondrous natural landscapes from around the globe, including incredible footage of the rarely spotted, almost mythical creatures that live in these habitats. Many of the images reveal inaccessible places that few have seen and record animal behavior that has never been filmed or photographed before. With the help of this highly advanced technology and the world's premier wildlife photographers, the book takes us on a spectacular journey from the world's greatest rivers and impressive gorges, to its mightiest mountains, hidden caves and caverns, and vast deserts. Planet Earth captures breathtaking sequences of predators and their prey, lush vistas of forests viewed from the tops of towering trees, the oceans and their mysterious creatures viewed from beneath the surface, and much more—in a magnificent adventure that brings unknown wonders of the natural world into our living rooms.Copub: BBC Worldwide Americas

    What is life? Why have creatures evolved as they are? Which species have been the most successful? Where does humanity fit in? Christopher Lloyd leads us on an extraordinary journey, from the birth of life to the present day, as he attempts to answer these questions and to explain the phenomena that we call 'life on Earth'.

    . . Excellent work."--Tim Flannery, The New York Review of BooksIn the century and a half since Audubon's death, his name has become synonymous with wildlife conservation and natural history. But few people know what a complicated figure he was--or the dramatic story behind The Birds of America.Before Audubon, ornithological illustrations depicted scaled-down birds perched in static poses. Wheeling beneath storm-racked skies or ripping flesh from freshly killed prey, Audubon's life-size birds looked as if they might fly screeching off the page. The wildness in the images matched the untamed spirit in Audubon-a self-taught painter and self-anointed aristocrat who, with his buckskins and long hair, wanted to be seen as both a hardened frontiersman and a cultured man of science. In truth, neither his friends nor his detractors ever knew exactly who Audubon was or where he came from. Tormented by a fog of ambiguities surrounding his birth, he reinvented himself ceaselessly, creating a life as dramatic as his fictionalizations of it. But when he came east at thirty-eight-broke and desperate to find a publisher for his Birds-he ran squarely into a scientific establishment still wedded to convention and suspicious of the brash newcomer and his grandiose claims. It took Audubon fifteen years to prevail in both his project and his vision. How he triumphed and what drove him is the subject of this gripping narrative.

    The book documents the adverse environmental effects caused by the indiscriminate use of pesticides. Carson accused the chemical industry of spreading disinformation, and public officials of accepting the industry's marketing claims unquestioningly.The book appeared in September 1962 and the outcry that followed its publication forced the banning of DDT and spurred revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land, and water. Carson’s book was instrumental in launching the environmental movement.

    All three books are set on the enchanted island of Corfu in the 1930s, and tell the story of the eccentric English family who moved there. For Gerald, the budding zoologist, Corfu was a natural paradise, teeming with strange birds and beasts that he could collect, watch and care for. But life was not without its problems - his family often objected to his animal-collecting activities, especially when the beasts wound up in the villa or - even worse - the fridge. With hilarious yet endearing portraits of his family and their many unusual hangers-on, The Corfu Trilogy also captures the beginnings of the author's lifelong love of animals. Recounted with immense humour and charm, this wonderful account of Corfu's natural history reveals a rare, magical childhood.

    Congress declared the locust “the single greatest impediment to the settlement of the country between Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains.” Throughout the nineteenth century, swarms of locusts regularly swept across the American continent, turning noon into dusk, devastating farm communities, and bringing trains to a halt. The outbreaks subsided in the 1890s, and then, suddenly—and mysteriously—the Rocky Mountain locust vanished. A century later, entomologist Jeffrey Lockwood vowed to discover why.Locust is the story of how one insect shaped the history of the western United States. A compelling personal narrative drawing on historical accounts and modern science, this beautifully written book brings to life the cultural, economic, and political forces at work in America in the late nineteenth century, even as it solves one of the greatest extinction mysteries of our time.

    As the mosquito transformed the landscapes of civilization, humans were unwittingly required to respond to its piercing impact and universal projection of power.The mosquito has determined the fates of empires and nations, razed and crippled economies, and decided the outcome of pivotal wars, killing nearly half of humanity along the way. She (only females bite) has dispatched an estimated 52 billion people from a total of 108 billion throughout our relatively brief existence. As the greatest purveyor of extermination we have ever known, she has played a greater role in shaping our human story than any other living thing with which we share our global village.Imagine for a moment a world without deadly mosquitoes, or any mosquitoes, for that matter? Our history and the world we know, or think we know, would be completely unrecognizable.Driven by surprising insights and fast-paced storytelling, The Mosquito is the extraordinary untold story of the mosquito's reign through human history and her indelible impact on our modern world order.