In exquisite prose, John Lewis-Stempel records the passage of the seasons from cowslips in spring to the hay-cutting of summer and grazing in autumn, and includes the biographies of the animals that inhabit the grass and the soil beneath: the badger clan, the fox family, the rabbit warren, the skylark brood and the curlew pair, among others. Their births, lives, and deaths are stories that thread through the book from first page to last.In Meadowland Lewis-Stempel does for meadows what Roger Deakin did for woodland and rivers in his bestselling books Wildwood and Waterlog.

    Each included adventure has been selected to show the extent to which Muir courted and faced danger, i.e. lived "wildly, " throughout his life. From the famous avalanche ride off the rim of Yosemite Valley to his night spent riding out a windstorm at the top of a tree to death-defying falls on Alaskan glaciers, the renowned outdoorsman's exploits are related in passages that are by turns exhilarating, unnerving, dizzying and outrageous.

    The consequences of losing beavers were profound: streams eroded, wetlands dried up, and species from salmon to swans lost vital habitat. Today, a growing coalition of “Beaver Believers”―including scientists, ranchers, and passionate citizens―recognizes that ecosystems with beavers are far healthier, for humans and non-humans alike, than those without them. From the Nevada deserts to the Scottish highlands, Believers are now hard at work restoring these industrious rodents to their former haunts. Eager is a powerful story about one of the world’s most influential species, how North America was colonized, how our landscapes have changed over the centuries, and how beavers can help us fight drought, flooding, wildfire, extinction, and the ravages of climate change. Ultimately, it’s about how we can learn to coexist, harmoniously and even beneficially, with our fellow travelers on this planet.

    He is as passionate about swamps, bogs, and vernal ponds and the creatures who live in them as most of us are about our families and closest friends. He knows frogs and snakes, muskrats and minks, dragonflies, water lilies, cattails, sedges--everything that swims, flies, trudges, slithers, or sinks its roots in wet places. In this "intimate and wise book" (Sue Hubbell), Carroll takes us on a lively, unforgettable yearlong journey, illustrated with his own elegant drawings, through the wetlands and reveals why they are so important to his life and ours -- and to all life on Earth.

    The sea surrounds us. It gives us life, provides us with the air we breathe and the food we eat. It is ceaseless change and constant presence. It covers two-thirds of our planet. Yet caught up in our everyday lives, we barely notice it. In The Sea Inside, Philip Hoare sets out to rediscover the sea, its islands, birds and beasts. He begins on the south coast where he grew up, a place of almost monastic escape. From there he travels to the other side of the world - the Azores, Sri Lanka, New Zealand - in search of encounters with animals and people. Navigating between human and natural history, he asks what these stories mean for us now. Along the way we meet an amazing cast; from scientists to tattooed warriors; from ravens to whales and bizarre creatures that may, or may not, be extinct. Part memoir, part fantastical travelogue, The Sea Inside takes us on an astounding journey of discovery.

    Here, in brief essays, she traces a tender and honest portrait of her complicated parents--her exuberant, creative mother; her steady, supportive father--and of the bittersweet moments that accompany a child's transition to caregiver.And here, braided into the overall narrative, Renkl offers observations on the world surrounding her suburban Nashville home. Ringing with rapture and heartache, these essays convey the dignity of bluebirds and rat snakes, monarch butterflies and native bees. As these two threads haunt and harmonize with each other, Renkl suggests that there is astonishment to be found in common things: in what seems ordinary, in what we all share. For in both worlds--the natural one and our own--"the shadow side of love is always loss, and grief is only love's own twin."Illustrated by the author's brother, Billy Renkl, Late Migrations is an assured and memorable debut.

    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.

    Their numbers are in freefall, dropping by nearly 70 percent in the last sixty years, a billion fewer now than in 1950. Extinction stalks the ocean, and there is a danger that the hundred-million-year-old cries of a seabird colony, rolling around in the bays and headlands of high latitudes, will this century become but a memory.

    In a series of essays that progress from the tiniest earth dwellers to the most far flung celestial bodies—considering the similarity of gods to donkeys, the inexorability of love and vines, the relations of exploding stars to exploding sea cucumbers—Amy Leach rekindles a vital communion with the wild world, dormant for far too long. Things That Are is not specifically of the animal, the human, or the phenomenal; it is a book of wonder, one the reader cannot help but leave with their perceptions both expanded and confounded in delightful ways.

    MacKinnon realized the grassland he grew up on was not the pristine wilderness he had always believed it to be. Instead, his home prairie was the outcome of a long history of transformation, from the disappearance of the grizzly bear to the introduction of cattle. What remains today is an illusion of the wild--an illusion that has in many ways created our world. In 3 beautifully drawn parts, MacKinnon revisits a globe exuberant with life, where lions roam North America and 20 times more whales swim in the sea. He traces how humans destroyed that reality, out of rapaciousness, yes, but also through a great forgetting. Finally, he calls for an "age of restoration," not only to revisit that richer and more awe-filled world, but to reconnect with our truest human nature. MacKinnon never fails to remind us that nature is a menagerie of marvels. Here are fish that pass down the wisdom of elders, landscapes still shaped by "ecological ghosts," a tortoise that is slowly remaking prehistory. "It remains a beautiful world," MacKinnon writes, "and it is its beauty, not its emptiness, that should inspire us to seek more nature in our lives."

    While an illness keeps her bedridden, Bailey watches a wild snail that has taken up residence on her nightstand. As a result, she discovers the solace and sense of wonder that this mysterious creature brings and comes to a greater understanding of her own confined place in the world. Intrigued by the snail’s molluscan anatomy, cryptic defenses, clear decision making, hydraulic locomotion, and mysterious courtship activities, Bailey becomes an astute and amused observer, providing a candid and engaging look into the curious life of this underappreciated small animal.  Told with wit and grace, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating is a remarkable journey of survival and resilience, showing us how a small part of the natural world illuminates our own human existence and provides an appreciation of what it means to be fully alive.

    From tales of vegetarian piranha fish and voiceless dogs to the scientific search for the genes that threaten to destroy the cheetah, Quammen captures the natural world with precision. A distinguished natural science essayist, Quammen’s reporting is masterful and thought provoking and his curiosity and fascination with the world of living things is infectious.

    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.

    To a smaller yet no less passionate audience, Fowles is also known for having written The Tree, one of his few works of nonfiction. First published a generation ago, it is a provocative meditation on the connection between the natural world and human creativity, and a powerful argument against taming the wild. In it, Fowles recounts his own childhood in England and describes how he rebelled against his Edwardian father’s obsession with the “quantifiable yield” of well-pruned fruit trees and came to prize instead the messy, purposeless beauty of nature left to its wildest. The Tree is an inspiring, even life-changing book, like Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, one that reaffirms our connection to nature and reminds us of the pleasure of getting lost, the merits of having no plan, and the wisdom of following one’s nose wherever it may lead—in life as much as in art.

    In this book the Dutchers reflect on the virtues they observed in wolf society and behavior. Each chapter exemplifies a principle, such as kindness, teamwork, playfulness, respect, curiosity, and compassion. Their heartfelt stories combine into a thought-provoking meditation on the values shared between the human and the animal world. Occasional photographs bring the wolves and their behaviors into absorbing focus.