We are only just discovering the reality of our avian adversaries, with their reptilian brains, their appetites for mayhem and the fact that they fly mostly to spite us. To ignore the information found within this volume may be at the peril of your very life.

    Their father, a Ted Hughes scholar and scruffy romantic, imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness.In this moment of despair they are visited by Crow - antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter. This self-described sentimental bird is attracted to the grieving family and threatens to stay until they no longer need him. As weeks turn to months and physical pain of loss gives way to memories, this little unit of three begin to heal.In this extraordinary debut - part novella, part polyphonic fable, part essay on grief, Max Porter's compassion and bravura style combine to dazzling effect. Full of unexpected humour and profound emotional truth, Grief is the Thing with Feathers marks the arrival of a thrilling new talent.

    When Margarete first came upon Arnie, he was just a familiar springtime sight: a baby bird lying helpless in the daisy patch. After unsucessfully trying to return him to the nest, she took him into her Texas home and raised him as carefully as she had raised her own child, teaching him to perch, to fly, even to talk. Arnie resisted all attempts to restore him to the wild, preferring steak and canned corn to worms, which frightened him, and even developing a taste for wine.Most astonishing of all, he learned to talk and sing, and he had a remarkable influence on a number of lives. Lenny, the young drug addict, paused on the road to self-destruction, so enthralled by Arnie that he carried a dog-eared picture of him in his wallet. Suzanne, the Vietnamese refugee, learned from Arnie that wrong home can be a prison and fled to Colorado to start a new life. Margarete's grandson, Travis, who called Arnie "Superbird," gained a new respect for wild creatures, and even her three cats came to love Arnie as one of their own.Arnie is full of life, laughter, and love. It is a completely irresistable book.

    Evolutionists have never been able to completely explain why birdsong is so inventive and why many species devote so many hours to singing. The standard explanations of defending territories and attracting mates don't begin to account for the variety and energy that the commonest birds exhibit. Is it possible that birds sing because they like to? This seemingly naive explanation is starting to look more and more like the truth. Why Birds Sing is a lyric exploration of birdsong that blends the latest scientific research with a deep understanding of musical beauty and form. Drawing on conversations with neuroscientists, ecologists, and composers, it is the first book to investigate the elusive question of why birds sing and what their song means to both avian and human ears. Whether playing his clarinet with the whitecrested laughing thrush in Pittsburgh, or jamming in the Australian winter breeding grounds of the Albert's lyrebird, Rothenberg immerses himself in the heart and soul of birdsong. He approaches the subject as a naturalist, philosopher, musician, and investigator. An intimate look at the mostlovely of natural phenomena, Why Birds Sing is a beautifully written exploration of a phenomenon that's at once familiar and profoundly alien.

    Stressing humane practices throughout, Glenn Drowns provides expert advice on breed selection, housing, feeding, behavior, breeding, health care, and processing your own meat and eggs. With tips on raising specialty species like doves, ostriches, and peafowl, you’ll be inspired to experiment with new breeds and add diversity to your poultry operation.

    The authors of this book draw information from themanual that is specific to academic writing and expand uponit using set-up instructions and a sample paper. The end resultof this transformational process yields a useful guide that canbe used along with the actual manual for successful academicwriting.The handbook covers many detailed specifications of the APAstyle...including in-text citations, source citations, and a samplepaper. It also sheds new light on the manual using step-by-stepprocesses and exemplification that enable readers to fulfill APArules and regulations while focusing on content, rather than theformat, of their academic research.

    Ever since she was a young girl, Meridian had been obsessed with birds, and she was determined to get her PhD, become an ornithologist, and make her mother's sacrifices to send her to college pay off. But she didn't expect to fall in love with her brilliant physics professor, Alden Whetstone. When he's recruited to Los Alamos, New Mexico, to take part in a mysterious wartime project, she reluctantly defers her own plans and joins him. What began as an exciting intellectual partnership devolves into a "traditional" marriage. And while the life of a housewife quickly proves stifling, it's not until years later, when Meridian meets a Vietnam veteran who opens her eyes to how the world is changing, that she realizes just how much she has given up. The repercussions of choosing a different path, though, may be too heavy a burden to bear. Elizabeth Church's stirring debut novel about ambition, identity, and sacrifice will ring true to every woman who has had to make the impossible choice between who she is and who circumstances demand her to be.

    Malik has been secretly in love with Rose Mbikwa, a woman who leads the weekly bird walks sponsored by the East African Ornithological Society. Just as Malik is getting up the nerve to invite Rose to the Nairobi Hunt Club Ball (the premier social occasion of the Kenyan calendar), Harry Khan, a nemesis from his school days, arrives in town.Khan has also become enraptured with Rose and announces his intent to invite her to the Ball. Rather than force Rose to choose between the two men, a clever solution is proposed. Whoever can identify the most species of birds in one week’s time gets the privilege of asking Ms. Mbikwa to the ball.

    Letters written by ordinary citizens to President Roosevelt and other government officials depict the conditions of life in America during the Depression.

    In looking back over his accomplishments, we are reminded of his groundbreaking work: He single-handedly began the rehabilitation of the wolf with Never Cry Wolf. He was the first to bring advocacy activism on behalf of the Inuit and their northern lands with People of the Deer and The Desperate People. And his was the first populist voice raised in defense of the environment and of the creatures with whom we share our world, the ones he has always called The Others. Otherwise is a memoir of the years between 1937 and the autumn of 1948 that tells the story of the events that forged the writer and activist. His was an innocent childhood, spent free of normal strictures, and largely in the company of an assortment of dogs, owls, squirrels, snakes, rabbits, and other wildlife. From this, he was catapulted into wartime service, as anxious as any other young man of his generation to get to Europe and the fighting. The carnage of the Italian campaign shattered his faith in humanity forever, and he returned home unable and unwilling to fit into post-war Canadian life. Desperate, he accepted a stint on a scientific collecting expedition to the Barrengrounds. There in the bleak but beautiful landscape he finds his purpose — first with the wolves and then with the indomitable but desperately starving Ihalmiut. Out of these experiences come his first pitched battles with an ignorant and uncaring federal bureaucracy as he tries to get aid for the famine-stricken Inuit. And out of these experiences, too, come his first books.Otherwise goes to the heart of who and what Farley Mowat is, a wondrous final achievement from a true titan.

    Threats from every direction. A young woman forced to discover the truth. Tessa Lamar, a Southern girl with a crazy family and a brand new college degree, wants nothing more than for her life to finally start. When her uncle dies unexpectedly, she inherits more than his old truck. As lifetimes of family secrets send her carefully planned world into a tailspin, she realizes nothing will ever be the same. After learning that she is not only a Firebird, but also half Nunnehi--the Cherokee equivalent to fairy--Tessa is forced to fight for her life against a conjurer determined to kill her, Tribal Elders trying to manipulate her, a crazier-than-a-bat mother, wolves, snakes, and one pissed off ghost. Worse still, she's caught between a gorgeous blue-eyed cop and a Nunnehi bodyguard who she can't decide if she wants to throttle or kiss. Good thing she was raised by two tough Southern ladies. The Spirit Tree is the first of the Tessa Lamar Novels, a Paranormal Romance with a Southern twist. If you like down south humor, supernatural creatures, and a healthy dose of romance, then you'll love this series. Buy Kindle Scout winner, The Spirit Tree, and get swept away in a world of magic, creatures, and family.

    While living on the eastern slope of Telegraph Hill, he made a magical discovery: a flock of wild parrots. In this unforgettable story, Bittner recounts how he became fascinated by the birds and patiently developed friendships with them that would last more than six years. When a documentary filmmaker comes along to capture the phenomenon on film, the story takes a surprising turn, and Bittner's life truly takes flight."A fascinating love story with wings." --Boston Herald"[A] charming memoir. For devoted birders everywhere." --Reader's Digest, Editor's Choice"[An] inspirational saga of one man finding his life's meaning in the most serendipitous way." --San Jose Mercury News"Instructive, surprising, sweet." --Gary Snyder, author of Turtle Island and Mountains and Rivers Without End

    b&w illustrations throughout.

    They are particularly known for their evocative calls which embody wild places; they provoke a range of emotions that many have expressed in poetry, art and music.There is a wildlife spectacle that can transport the soul to a place of yearning and beauty, to an experience that has inspired generations of thinkers and dreamers. Imagine if you will, a blustery, cold day in December. Bitterly cold. A bird stands alone on the edge of a mudflat, some distance from where you are standing. Its silhouette is unmistakable. A plump body sits atop long, stilty legs. The long neck arcs into a small head, which tapers further into a long curved bill. The smooth, convex outlines of this curlew are alluring. They touch some ancestral liking we all have for shapes that are round and smooth. The curved curlew’s outline is anomalous in this planar, uniform landscape, but its colour blends well. The mud is gunmetal grey, the curlew brown and the water murky. The sky is dull with a hint of drab. The air is infused with the smells of decay.Over the last thirty years curlew numbers have fallen by an alarming 20 per cent across the European continent, and in their most western reaches in the Irish Republic there is nothing short of a disaster unfolding. In the 1980s there were around 5,000 pairs of nesting curlews, today there are fewer than 130, a staggering drop of 99 per cent. So alarming are the figures that curlews were made a species of highest conservation concern in the UK in December 2015, and put onto the red list of threatened species by the IUCN, the worldwide union of conservation bodies which monitors the status of animals and plants throughout the globe. They are now in the same category as jaguars, ‘near threatened,’ which means extinction is likely in the future.This transition of curlews to high conservation status made it clear they were slipping away for problems that could be addressed with the public and political will to solve them. It was then that the idea of a 500-mile journey by foot began to crystallise in Mary Colwell’s mind and became a concrete plan. Colwell decided to take time out to walk from the West coast of Ireland through Wales to the East coast of England to raise awareness about its plight, and to raise funds to protect this beautiful bird and its habitat.Colwell started walking in the early spring when birds were first arriving on their breeding grounds in the west of Ireland, walking through to Wales when they incubated their eggs. She then travelled through England to coincide with the time when the chicks were hatching. Six weeks after setting out she arrived in East Anglia as the fledglings were beginning to try out their wings. By finishing on the east coast, she marked the place where many curlews would come to spend the winter.Colwell chronicles her impressive journey in this beautifully illustrated book, weaving a wonderfully told story of the experiences on her walk, interspersed with the natural history of this most impressive of birds that has fascinated us for millennia.

    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.