The complex behavior of birds recounted here demonstrates that birds have sophisticated mental abilities previously unrecognized by conventional avian research. Ackerman supports her thesis with descriptions of the behavior of an entertaining variety of birds from across the world. She brings scientific research alive with personal field observations and accounts of her encounters with colorful and fascinating birds. Throughout, Ackerman reminds readers that birds are thinking beings--their brains are wired differently than those of mammals, giving them increased brain power despite their small size. She further makes the case that bird intelligence shows that humankind is not alone in using language and tools or constructing complex structures and manipulating other creatures.

    Then make it better.I am 94. I've had an extraordinary life. It's only now that I appreciate how extraordinary.As a young man, I felt I was out there in the wild, experiencing the untouched natural world - but it was an illusion. The tragedy of our time has been happening all around us, barely noticeable from day to day - the loss of our planet's wild places, its biodiversity.I have been witness to this decline. A Life on Our Planet is my witness statement, and my vision for the future. It is the story of how we came to make this, our greatest mistake - and how, if we act now, we can yet put it right.We have one final chance to create the perfect home for ourselves and restore the wonderful world we inherited.All we need is the will to do so.

    And survival is never a given. Somehow, a blind, defenseless tiger kitten must evolve into a deadly, efficient predator; a chimp must learn to distinguish edible plants from lethal poisons; a baby buffalo must be able to pick its mother out of a herd of hundreds. Contrary to common belief, not everything is "hardwired" -- or instinctual -- in the animal kingdom. Many skills a wild animal needs to thrive, to grow, to be what nature intended, must be developed through play, painstaking teaching, and often treacherous trial and error. The coming-of-age processes of the myriad creatures of plain, forest, ocean, and jungle are truly fascinating and often astonishing natural events.In Becoming a Tiger, Susan McCarthy, co-author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller When Elephants Weep, offers readers an in-depth look into the amazing ways baby animals learn not only about themselves, but about their world and ours -- and how to survive in both. Based on extensive scientific research done in the lab, in controlled "natural" settings, as well as in the wild, her findings provide stunning new insights into the lives and development of Earth's nonhuman inhabitants -- not only tigers, but lions, bears, bats, rats, birds, dolphins, whales, apes, elephants, and dozens of other species.Sharing stories and discoveries at once captivating, funny, breathtaking, provocative, and heartwarming, Susan McCarthy carries us on a remarkable journey into untamed places, immersing us in the fascinating, complex, and hitherto unimagined societies and cultures of the beasts and birds. Along the way she shines a brilliant new light on subjects scientists, biologists, and zoologists have only begun to explore, revealing startling truths about the behavior, and sometimes humanlike foibles, of creatures great and small.Warm, informative, and beautifully written, Becoming a Tiger is an enthralling reading experience for animal lovers everywhere. In the transformation tales of playful pups, big-footed cubs, and scrawny chicks becoming deadly hunters, able foragers, and deft nest-builders are valuable and enriching life lessons for members of our own inquisitive, ever-developing species.

    This special, large-format volume is geared as much to nonbirders as it is to the out-and-out obsessed, covering more than two hundred species and including more than 330 new illustrations by the author. While its focus is on familiar backyard birds--blue jays, nuthatches, chickadees--it also examines certain species that can be fairly easily observed, such as the seashore-dwelling Atlantic puffin. David Sibley's artwork and expertise bring observed behaviors vividly to life. (For most species, the primary illustration is reproduced life-sized.) And while the text is aimed at adults--including fascinating new scientific research on the myriad ways birds have adapted to environmental changes--it is nontechnical, making it the perfect occasion for parents and grandparents to share their love of birds with young children, who will delight in the big, full-color illustrations of birds in action.

    They attracted followers ranging from Thomas Jefferson, who laid out mastodon bones on the White House floor, to twentieth-century doctors who used their knowledge of new species to conquer epidemic diseases. Acclaimed science writer Richard Conniff brings these daredevil "species seekers" to vivid life. Alongside their globe-spanning tales of adventure, he recounts some of the most dramatic shifts in the history of human thought. At the start, everyone accepted that the Earth had been created for our benefit. We weren't sure where vegetable ended and animal began, we couldn't classify species, and we didn't understand the causes of disease. But all that changed as the species seekers introduced us to the pantheon of life on Earth—and our place within it.

    Run-down yet romantic, The Big House stands not only as a cherished reminder of summer’s ephemeral pleasures but also as a powerful symbol of a vanishing way of life.

    Darwin's ruminations on the Galapagos Islands, Melville's exploration of the "whiteness of the whale, " and Thoreau's communion with Walden Pond are monuments in the history of writing and thought. "The Norton Book of Nature Writing, " including 125 selections by 94 writers, is the fist definitive and comprehensive collection of the many voices of nature writing which have flourished in English and American over the last two hundred years.

    When he purchased four acres of land on Vashon Island, he was looking for an affordable home a ferry ride away from the restaurants he ran in Seattle. But as he continued to serve his customers frozen chicken breasts and packaged pork, he became aware of the connection between what he ate and where it came from: a hive of bees provided honey; a young cow could give fresh milk; an apple orchard allowed him to make vinegar. Told in Timmermeister's plainspoken voice, Growing a Farmer details with honesty the initial stumbles and subsequent realities he had to face in his quest to establish a profitable farm for himself. Personal yet practical, Growing a Farmer includes the specifics of making cheese, raising cows, and slaughtering pigs, and it will recast entirely the way we think about our relationship to the food we consume.

    Each of us, too, is a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. One life-defining lesson Lauret Savoy learned as a young girl was this: the American land did not hate. As an educator and Earth historian, she has tracked the continent’s past from the relics of deep time; but the paths of ancestors toward her—paths of free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples indigenous to this land—lie largely eroded and lost.In this provocative and powerful mosaic of personal journeys and historical inquiry across a continent and time, Savoy explores how the country’s still unfolding history, and ideas of “race,” have marked her and the land. From twisted terrain within the San Andreas Fault zone to a South Carolina plantation, from national parks to burial grounds, from “Indian Territory” and the U.S.-Mexico Border to the U.S. capital, Trace grapples with a searing national history to reveal the often unvoiced presence of the past.In distinctive and illuminating prose that is attentive to the rhythms of language and landscapes, she weaves together human stories of migration, silence, and displacement, as epic as the continent they survey, with uplifted mountains, braided streams, and eroded canyons.

    Harriman organized a most unusual summer voyage to the wilds of Alaska: He converted a steamship into a luxury "floating university," populated by some of America's best and brightest scientists and writers, including the anti-capitalist eco-prophet John Muir. Those aboard encountered a land of immeasurable beauty and impending environmental calamity. More than a hundred years later, Alaska is still America's most sublime wilderness, both the lure that draws a million tourists annually on Inside Passage cruises and a natural resources larder waiting to be raided. As ever, it remains a magnet for weirdos and dreamers.Armed with Dramamine and an industrial-strength mosquito net, Mark Adams sets out to retrace the 1899 expedition. Using the state's intricate public ferry system, the Alaska Marine Highway System, Adams travels three thousand miles, following the George W. Elder's itinerary north through Wrangell, Juneau, and Glacier Bay, then continuing west into the colder and stranger regions of the Aleutians and the Arctic Circle. Along the way, he encounters dozens of unusual characters (and a couple of very hungry bears) and investigates how lessons learned in 1899 might relate to Alaska's current struggles in adapting to climate change.

    Over the course of a year, Ehrlich experiences firsthand the myriad expressions of cold, giving us marvelous histories of wind, water, snow, and ice, of ocean currents and weather cycles. From Tierra del Fuego in the south to Spitsbergen, east of Greenland, at the very top of the world, she explores how our very consciousness is animated and enlivened by the archaic rhythms and erupting oscillations of weather. We share Ehrlich’s experience of the thrills of cold, but also her questions: What will happen to us if we are “deseasoned”? If winter ends, will we survive?

    The two friends got to work designing what would become not just another urban farm, but a "permaculture paradise" replete with perennial broccoli, paw paws, bananas, and moringa--all told, more than two hundred low-maintenance edible plants in an innovative food forest on a small city lot. The garden--intended to function like a natural ecosystem with the plants themselves providing most of the garden's needs for fertility, pest control, and weed suppression--also features an edible water garden, a year-round unheated greenhouse, tropical crops, urban poultry, and even silkworms.In telling the story of Paradise Lot, Toensmeier explains the principles and practices of permaculture, the choice of exotic and unusual food plants, the techniques of design and cultivation, and, of course, the adventures, mistakes, and do-overs in the process. Packed full of detailed, useful information about designing a highly productive permaculture garden, Paradise Lot is also a funny and charming story of two single guys, both plant nerds, with a wild plan: to realize the garden of their dreams and meet women to share it with. Amazingly, on both counts, they succeed.

    He needed "something to pare the fat off my soul...to make me grateful, again, for being alive." The 1,700 miles between the Colorado's source in Wyoming and its conclusion at Mexico's Gulf of California contain some of the most spectacular vistas on earth, and Fletcher is the ideal guide for the terrain. As his privileged companions, we travel to places like Disaster Falls and Desolation Canyon, observe beaver and elk, experience sandstorms and whitewater rapids, and share Fletcher's thoughts on the human race, the environment, and the joys of solitude.

    Four months later, unexpected events would trap Simon alone on his boat, frozen in ice 100 miles from the nearest settlement, with the long polar night stretching into darkness for months to come. With his world circumscribed by screaming blizzards and marauding polar bears and his only companion a kittten named Halifax, Simon withstands months of crushing loneliness, sudden blindness, and private demons. Trapped in a boat buried beneath the drifting snow, he struggles through the perpertual darkness toward a spiritual awakening and an understanding of the forces that conspired to bring him there. He emerges five months later a transformed man. Simon's powerful, triumphant story combines the suspense of "Into Thin Air" with a crystalline, lyrical prose to explore the hypnotic draw of one of the earth's deepest and most dangerous wildernesses.

    After the birth of their first son, she and her husband Jeffrey Dean Morgan, the star of The Walking Dead, decided to make a major change: they bought a working farm in Rhinebeck, New York, and began a new chapter in their lives.The Rural Diaries chronicles her inspiring story of farm life: chopping wood, making dandelion wine, building chicken coops. Burton looks back at her transition from urban to country living—discovering how to manage a farm while raising her son and making friends with her new neighbors. She mixes charming stories of learning to raise alpacas and buying and revitalizing the town’s beloved candy store, Samuel’s Sweet Shop, with raw observations on the ups and downs of marriage and her struggles with secondary infertility. Burton also includes delicious recipes that can be made with fresh ingredients at home, as well as home renovation and gardening tips.Burton’s charisma, wide eyed attitude, and fortitude—both internal and physical—propels this moving story of transformation and self-discovery. The Rural Diaries honors the values and lifestyle of small-town America and offers inspiration for anyone longing to embark on their own unconventional journey.