In this extraordinary feat of nature writing, we meet ants who harvest crops, raise insects as livestock, build roadways and bridges, embark on nuptial flights, and make war.

    Line" the author introduces his friend John McPhee, a bush-pilot fish-and-game warden in northern Maine, who is also a writer. The two men met after the flying warden wrote to The New Yorker complaining that someone was using his name. Maine also is the milieu of "Heirs of General Practice," McPhee's highly acclaimed report—virtually a book in itself—on the new medical specialty called family practice. Much of it takes place in the examining rooms of a dozen young physicans in various rural communities, where they are seen in the context of their work with a great many patients of all ages.Two relatively short pieces revisit the subjects of earlier McPhee books. "Ice Pond" demonstrates anew the innovative genius of the physicist Theodore B. Taylor, who developed a way of making and using with impressive results in the conservation of the electrical energy. "Open Man" describes a summer day in New Jersey in the company of Senator Bill Bradley.In "Minihydro," various small-scale entrepreneurs in New York State set up turbines at nineteenth-century mill sites and sell electricity to power companies. A nice little country waterfall can earn as much as two hundred dollars a year for someone with such a turbine. And, "Under the Snow," McPhee Goes back into black bear's dens in Pensylvania in winter, where he becomes intoxicated with affection for some five-pound cubs. They remind him of his daughters.

    In this, his last book completed just before his death, Sigurd F. Olson guides readers through his wide-ranging memories of a lifetime dedicated to the preservation of the wilderness.

    These fascinating, enigmatic creatures are a key lynchpin in the working of our planet. Without them the landscape, as well as every aisle in our supermarkets would look radically different. And we're not just talking about honey bees. There are more than 20,000 species of bee worldwide and only a handful make honey. Some live in colonies and others are solitary. We can all help protect them - and they desperately need protecting - but you can't save what you don't love. And you can't love what you don't know. The Good Bee is a celebration of this most vital and mysterious of nature's wizards. Here you'll discover the complexities of bee behaviour - as well as the bits that still baffle us - the part they play in the natural world, their relationship with us throughout history, how they are coming under threat and what we can all do about it.Beautifully produced, with hand-made illustrations throughout, it is a story for our times and a book to treasure.

    But centuries of exploitation and ivory hunting have taken their toll: now, as wars and poachers continue to ravage its habitat, as disease and political strife deflect attention from its plight, the African elephant faces imminent extinction. What will become of these magnificent beasts? As the elephant's future looms ever darker, Martin Meredith's concise and richly illustrated biography traces the elephant's history from the first ivory expeditions of the Egyptian pharaohs 2500 years ago to today, exploring along the way the indelible imprint the African elephant has made in art, literature, culture, and society. He shares recent extraordinary discoveries about the elephant's sophisticated family and community structure and reveals the remarkable ways in which elephants show compassion and loyalty to each other. Elegant, illuminating, and urgent, Elephant Destiny offers a beautiful and important tribute to one of earth's most magisterial creatures at the very moment it threatens to vanish from being.

    Gabrielle Walker, author, consultant to New Scientist and regular broadcaster with the BBC has written a book unlike any that has ever been written about the continent. Antarctica weaves all the significant threads into an intricate tapestry, made up of science, natural history, poetry, epic history, what it feels like to be there and why it draws so many different kinds of people back there again and again. It is only when all the parts come together that the underlying truths of the continent emerge. Antarctica is the most alien place on Earth, the only part of our planet where humans could never survive unaided. It is truly like walking on another planet. And yet, in its silence, its agelessness and its mysteries lie the secrets of our past, and of our future.

    Photographer Glen Denny was a key figure in this golden age of climbing, capturing pioneering feats on camera while tackling challenging ascents himself.In entertaining short pieces enlivened by his iconic black-and-white images of Yosemite's big wall legends, Denny reveals a young man's coming of age and provides a vivid look at Yosemite’s early climbing culture. He relates such precarious achievements as hauling water in glass gallon jugs up the east face of Washington Column, nailing the 750-foot Rostrum in a punishing heat wave, and dangling overnight on El Capitan’s Dihedral Wall in a lightning storm. Each true tale captures the spirit of historic Camp 4, where Denny and others plan the next big climb while living on the cheap and dodging park rangers.

    These torchlight adventures have since inspired a generation of scientists, and his research is still considered useful today. In The Secret Life of Wombats, James Woodford pursues Nicholson's story and embarks on his own journey to uncover the true nature of our most intriguing marsupial."Woodford has done the research, he has read widely, spoken with the major wombat pundits and with the lay observers. He has travelled to gain direct experience of all species...I know more about wombats than I did, and retain some stark images which I hope never to lose." - Sunday Age.

    As a boy, Teddy Roosevelt learned taxidermy from a man who had sailed up the Missouri River with Audubon, and yet as president presided over America's entry into the twentieth century, in which our ability to destroy ourselves and the natural world was no longer metaphorical. Roosevelt, an avid birder, was born a hunter and died a conservationist.Today, forty-six million Americans are bird-watchers. The Life of the Skies is a genre-bending journey into the meaning of a pursuit born out of the tangled history of industrialization and nature longing. Jonathan Rosen set out on a quest not merely to see birds but to fathom their centrality—historical and literary, spiritual and scientific—to a culture torn between the desire both to conquer and to conserve.Rosen argues that bird-watching is nothing less than the real national pastime—indeed it is more than that, because the field of play is the earth itself. We are the players and the spectators, and the outcome—since bird and watcher are intimately connected—is literally a matter of life and death.

    Making use of remarkable scientific discoveries that transform our understanding of how natural systems work, George Monbiot explores a new, positive environmentalism that shows how damaged ecosystems on land and at sea can be restored, and how this restoration can revitalize and enrich our lives. Challenging what he calls his “ecological boredom,” Monbiot weaves together a beautiful and riveting tale of wild places, wildlife, and wild people. Roaming the hills of Britain and the forests of Europe, kayaking off the coast of Wales with dolphins and seabirds, he seeks out the places that still possess something of the untamed spirit he would like to resurrect.He meets people trying to restore lost forests and bring back missing species—such as wolves, lynx, wolverines, wild boar, and gray whales—and explores astonishing evidence that certain species, not just humans, have the power to shape the physical landscape. This process of rewilding, Monbiot argues, offers an alternative to a silent spring: the chance of a raucous summer in which ecological processes resume and humans draw closer to the natural world.

    When he emerged three years later, the summation of his efforts only hinted at what he'd experienced in one of the most dangerous regions on earth. Armed with an astonishing collection of zoological specimens, Du Chaillu leapt from the physical challenges of the jungle straight into the center of the biggest issues of the time--the evolution debate, racial discourse, the growth of Christian fundamentalism--and helped push each to unprecedented intensities. He experienced instant celebrity, but with that fame came whispers--about his past, his credibility, and his very identity--which would haunt the young man. Grand in scope, immediate in detail, and propulsively readable, Between Man and Beast brilliantly combines Du Chaillu's personal journey with the epic tale of a world hovering on the sharp edge of transformation.

    The Next Tsunami: Living on a Restless Coast is the gripping story of the geological discoveries—and the scientists who uncovered them—that signal the imminence of a catastrophic tsunami on the Northwest Coast.

    You are missing what is happening in the distance and right in front of you. In reading these words, you are ignoring an unthinkably large amount of information that continues to bombard all of your senses. The hum of the fluorescent lights; the ambient noise in the room; the feeling of the chair against your legs or back; your tongue touching the roof of your mouth; the tension you are holding in your shoulders or jaw; the constant hum of traffic or a distant lawnmower; the blurred view of your own shoulders and torso in your peripheral vision; a chirp of a bug or whine of a kitchen appliance.On Looking begins with inattention. It is not meant to help you focus on your reading of Tolstoy; it is not about how to multitask. Rather, it is about attending to the joys of the unattended, the perceived "ordinary." Horowitz encourages us to rediscover the extraordinary things that we are missing in our ordinary activities. Even when engaged in the simplest of activities - taking a walk around the block - we pay so little attention to most of what is right before us that we are sleepwalkers in our own lives. So turn off the phone and portable electronics and get into the real world, where you'll find there are worlds within worlds within worlds.

    In 1992, in a remote mountain range, a team of scientists discovered the remains of an unusual animal with exquisite long horns. It turned out to be a living species new to Western science -- a saola, the first large land mammal discovered in fifty years. Rare then and rarer now, a live saola had never been glimpsed by a Westerner in the wild when Pulitzer Prize finalist and nature writer William deBuys and conservation biologist William Robichaud set off to search for it in central Laos. Their team endured a punishing trek up and down white-water rivers and through mountainous terrain ribboned with the snare lines of armed poachers who roamed the forest, stripping it of wildlife. In the tradition of Bruce Chatwin, Colin Thubron, and Peter Matthiessen, The Last Unicorn chronicles deBuys's journey deep into one of the world's most remote places. It's a story rich with the joys and sorrows of an expedition into undiscovered country, pursuing a species as rare and elusive as the fabled unicorn. As is true with the quest for the unicorn, in the end the expedition becomes a search for something more: the essence of wildness in nature, evidence that the soul of a place can endure, and the transformative power of natural beauty.

    Among them were Pete and Linda Dunne, who set off from there on a year-long odyssey. Dunne has poured the most remarkable stories, birds, and characters into this unforgettable book about their once-in-a-lifetime adventure.