Illustrated throughout, this handbook of birds covers the most common British and European birds in detail.

    You may think you know your cat as he purrs in your lap, but come across your pet in the street on a dark night and you might think that Bagpuss suffers from a dual personality.Every single feline pet carries an inheritance of amazing sensory capacities, vocal utterances, body language and territorial displays. By answering such questions as 'what does a cat signal with its ears? 'why does a cat rub up against your leg?' and 'why does a cat swing its head from side to side when staring at its prey?', Desmond Morris decodes the private world of the cat.Your cat is full of surprises and our finest zoologist is about to reveal their secrets in this beautifully repackaged edition of a much loved bestseller.

    For millions, the Galápagos Islands represent nature at its most unspoiled, an inviolate place famed for its rare flora and fauna. But soon today’s 30,000 human residents could surpass 50,000. Add invasive species, floods of tourists, and unresolved conflicts between Ecuadorian laws and local concerns, and it’s easy to see why the Galápagos were recently added to UNESCO’s World Heritage in Danger list. Each chapter in this provocative, perceptive book focuses on a specific person or group with a stake in the Galápagos’ natural resources—from tour companies whose activities are often illegal and not always green, to creationist guides who lead tours with no mention of evolution, from fishermen up in arms over lobster quotas, to modern-day pirates who poach endangered marine species. Bassett presents a perspective as readable as it is sensible. Told with wit, passion, and grace, the Galápagos story serves as a miniature model of Earth itself, a perfect example of how an environment can be destroyed-- and what is being done to preserve these islands before it's too late.

    The coloring book helps you memorize the anatomy content you need to know in both veterinary medicine and veterinary technology and gives you a fun way to review the information you have studied. All illustrations in the book are suitable for coloring and are of the highest quality, created by expert medical illustrators.Organized by body region, the book is divided into sections devoted to the head and neck; neck, back, and vertebral column; thorax; abdomen; pelvis; forlimb; and hindlimb.Numbered lead lines clearly identify structures to be colored and correspond to a numbered list beneath the illustration so you can easily visualize the veterinary anatomy. Plus, you can create your own color code using the numbered boxes provided for each illustration.Comprehensive veterinary anatomy coverage helps you reinforce your understanding of canine, feline, equine, porcine, ruminants, and avian anatomy.High quality illustrations make it easy for you to color in each anatomic region and review anatomic details.Self-study format provides a fun and interactive way to prepare for exams throughout your veterinary courses.Part of Elsevier's complete veterinary anatomy learning system, integrating core anatomy knowledge, engaging review, hands-on practice, and clinical application to give you a solid foundation for success!

    Half polar bear, half grizzly, this never-before-seen animal might be dismissed as a fluke of nature. Anthony Barnosky instead sees it as a harbinger of things to come.In Heatstroke, the renowned paleoecologist shows how global warming is fundamentally changing the natural world and its creatures. While melting ice may have helped produce the pizzly, climate change is more likely to wipe out species than to create them. Plants and animals that have followed the samerhythms for millennia are suddenly being confronted with a world they’re unprepared for—and adaptation usually isn’t an option.This is not the first time climate change has dramatically transformed Earth. Barnosky draws connections between the coming centuries and the end of the last ice age, when mass extinctions swept the planet. The differences now are that climate change is faster and hotter than past changes, and for the first time humanity is driving it. Which means this time we can work to stop it.No one knows exactly what nature will come to look like in this new age of global warming. But Heatstroke gives us a haunting portrait of what we stand to lose and the vitality of what can be saved.

    

    Lads Before the Wind is also the most readable book written on the new science of training and communicating with positive reinforcemnet.

    For American multimillionaire Greg Carr, a tech mogul seeking new challenges, it looked like a perfect place for Western philanthropy: under his guidance, he promised, Gorongosa would be revived as an ecological paradise. But what of the local Mozambicans themselves, who had been living in the area for centuries? In White Man's Game, journalist Stephanie Hanes traces Carr's effort to tackle one of the world's biggest environmental challenges, showing how the ambitious reconstruction turned into a dramatic clash of cultures.In vivid, you-are-there stories, Hanes takes readers on a virtual safari into this remote corner of southern Africa. She faces down lions and malaria, describes what it takes to transport an elephant across international borders, and talks to park workers and wildlife poachers—who sometimes turn out to be one and the same. And she examines the larger issues that arise when Western do-gooders try to “fix” complex, messy situations in Africa, acting with best intentions yet ignoring the experience of the people who actually live there.A gripping narrative of environmentalists and warlords, elephants and rainmakers, poachers and millionaires, White Man's Game profoundly challenges the way we think about philanthropy and conservation.

    

    Starting with the story of her revolutionary discovery that elephants use infrasonic sounds--sounds below the range of human hearing--to communicate, Payne shares what she learned from her fascinating field research in Africa, research that reveals new insights into elephants' social lives. When five of the elephant families she studies are the victims of culling, Payne's approach to her research changes, as she fights valiantly to protect the elephants. The result of her research, and the touching insights gained from Africans she worked with and the elephants she studied, give a vivid impression of Payne's view from the front lines of the natural preservation effort. Like Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard and the writings of Jane Goodall, Silent Thunder demonstrates how a commitment to all life can bring one's own into a new focus.

    From menacing moonshiners and armed bandits to charging elephants and man-eating tigers, Merlin Tuttle has stopped at nothing to find and protect bats on every continent they inhabit. Enamored of bats ever since discovering a colony in a cave as a boy, Tuttle saw how effective photography could be in persuading people not to fear bats, and he has spent his career traveling the world to document them.Few people realize how sophisticated and intelligent bats are. Tuttle shares research showing that frog-eating bats can identify frogs by their calls, that vampire bats have a social order similar to that of primates, and that bats have remarkable memories. Bats also provide enormous benefits by eating crop pests, pollinating plants, and carrying seeds needed for reforestation. They save farmers billions of dollars annually and are essential to a healthy planet.Sharing highlights from a lifetime of adventure and discovery, Tuttle takes us to the frontiers of bat research and conservation and forever changes the way we see these poorly understood yet fascinating creatures.

    On a trek that lasts 17 months and takes him from the Caribbean to the whaling grounds off South Africa, and across the Indian Ocean to the South Australian coast, Matthiessen describes the awesome experience of swimming in open water among hundreds of sharks; the beauties of strange seas and landscapes; and the camaraderie, tension, humor, and frustrations that develop when people continually risking their lives dwell in close proximity day after day. Filled with acute observations of natural history in exotic areas around the world, Blue Meridian records a harrowing account of one of the great adventures of our time.

    From New England aquarium tanks to the reefs of French Polynesia and the Gulf of Mexico, she has befriended octopuses with strikingly different personalities—gentle Athena, assertive Octavia, curious Kali, and joyful Karma. Each creature shows her cleverness in myriad ways: escaping enclosures like an orangutan; jetting water to bounce balls; and endlessly tricking companions with multiple “sleights of hand” to get food.Scientists have only recently accepted the intelligence of dogs, birds, and chimpanzees but now are watching octopuses solve problems and are trying to decipher the meaning of the animal’s color-changing techniques. With her “joyful passion for these intelligent and fascinating creatures” (Library Journal Editors’ Spring Pick), Montgomery chronicles the growing appreciation of this mollusk as she tells a unique love story. By turns funny, entertaining, touching, and profound, The Soul of an Octopus reveals what octopuses can teach us about the meeting of two very different minds.

    Featuring 50 common North American birds, such as the White-Breasted Butt Nugget and the Goddamned Canada Goose (or White-Breasted Nuthatch and Canada Goose for the layperson), Matt Kracht identifies all the idiots in your backyard and details exactly why they suck with ink drawings. Each entry is accompanied by facts about a bird's (annoying) call, its (dumb) migratory pattern, its (downright tacky) markings, and more.The essential guide to all things wings with migratory maps, tips for birding, musings on the avian population, and the ethics of birdwatching.

    In biology labs across the world, fruit flies are turning up answers to some of the basic questions of life. It's business as usual for the fly, which for generations has been defining biology's major landmarks. From genetics to development, behavior to aging, and evolution to the origin of species, the fruit fly has been a key player in some of the twentieth century's greatest biological discoveries.Techniques to pinpoint genes that play a role in human disease depend on genetic mapmaking principles first established with the fly. It was experiments on fruit flies that opened our eyes to the dangers of radiation to human health. In fact, everything from gene therapy to cloning to the Human Genome Project is built on the foundation of fruit fly research. Despite its many achievements, the fruit fly remains an unsung hero in the history of science. At last, here is a book that gives the fly its long overdue credit.In a highly original, witty, and irreverent style, Martin Brookes takes us through successive stages in the life cycle of the fly, each illustrating an important concept in biology. Some, such as the fundamentals of heredity, are well established; others, such as sexual warfare, learning, and memory, are still in their infancy. But whether flies are getting high on crack cocaine, enjoying the pleasures and pains of a boozy night out, being trained by punishment and reward, or struggling with insomnia, this book provides a glimpse of how one short life has informed almost every aspect of human existence. The result is a broad introduction to biology with insights into the practical realities of science.Often dismissed as irrelevant outside academic circles, the fruit fly, through this distinctive biography, will come to be recognized for what it really is: an icon of twentieth-century science and a window on our own biological world.