Showing titles in Animals

The Fishing Life is an entertaining anthology of fishing anecdotes and well-researched articles from across Paul Schullery’s research and fishing career. The author offers up stories, essays, farces, daydreams, and ruminations that will engage listeners of all kinds. Of course, being a fisherman and living the fishing life goes beyond just those days spent with rod and reel in hand. It is something that occupies your mind and your heart, not just your hands.

Boyd Varty had an unconventional upbringing. He grew up on Londolozi Game Reserve in South Africa, a place where man and nature strive for balance, where perils exist alongside wonders. Founded more than 80 years ago as a hunting ground, Londolozi was transformed into a nature reserve beginning in 1973 by Varty’s father and uncle, visionaries of the restoration movement. But it wasn’t just a sanctuary for the animals; it was also a place for ravaged land to flourish again and for the human spirit to be restored.

What is it like to be a swift, flying at over one hundred kilometres an hour? Or a kiwi, plodding flightlessly among the humid undergrowth in the pitch dark of a New Zealand night? And what is going on inside the head of a nightingale as it sings, and how does its brain improvise? Bird Sense addresses questions like these and many more, by describing the senses of birds that enable them to interpret their environment and to interact with each other.

Becoming Wild offers a glimpse into cultures among nonhuman animals through looks at the lives of individuals in different present-day animal societies. By showing how others teach and learn, Safina offers a fresh understanding of what is constantly going on beyond humanity. With reporting from deep in nature, alongside individual creatures in their free-living communities, this audiobook offers a very privileged glimpse behind the curtain of life on Earth and helps inform the answer to that most urgent of questions: Who are we here with?

The ability to communicate with animals is not a rare gift, but a skill we all possess. On The Beginner's Guide to Animal Communication, author and teacher Carol Gurney brings nearly 20 years of experience in interpreting the language of animals to anyone seeking a heart-to-heart connection with the special companions in their lives.

Dinosaurs. No other class of animals captures the hearts of both children and adults alike. Paleontologist Armin Schmitt brings us a firsthand account of the latest research on dinosaurs and their lives millions of years ago, including his spectacular global excavations and fascinating discoveries in the field. With the help of cutting-edge technology and unbelievable new finds, the age-old tale of the dinosaurs is now revitalized for the very first time, complete with astonishing illustrations by Ben Rennen that help us imagine dinosaurs like never before.

In New Guinea Pidgin, Thrown Way Leg means to go on a journey and it is also Tim Flannery's invitation to join him on his breathtaking adventure through the jungles of Papua New Guinea and Irian Jaya. Flannery meets skilled hunters, befriends shaman, climbs mountains never before scaled by Europeans, discovers new species and stumbles across the giant bones of extinct marsupials. You will never think about the bird-shaped island to our north the same way again.

Whales are among the largest, most intelligent, deepest diving species to have ever lived on our planet. We have hunted them for thousands of years and scratched their icons into our mythologies. They simultaneously fill us with waves of terror, awe and affection - yet we know hardly anything about them. Whales tend to enter our awareness only when they die, struck by a ship or stranded in the surf. They evolved from land-roaming, doglike creatures into animals that move like fish and breathe like us and can grow to 300,000 pounds, live 200 years and roam entire ocean basins. Yet despite centuries of observing whales, we know little about their evolutionary past.

Dr Dean Lomax brings these prehistoric creatures to life in 10 bite-sized essays, perfect for people short on time but not curiosity. Making big ideas simple, Dean takes listeners on a journey to uncover what makes a dinosaur a dinosaur, what dinosaurs ate, how they evolved, what caused them to go extinct and more!

Being among bees is a full-body experience, Mark Winston writes. Bee Time presents his reflections on three decades spent studying these remarkable creatures, and on the lessons they can teach about how humans might better interact with one another and the natural world, from the boardroom to urban design to agricultural ecosystems.

Terrible lizards. That’s what the word dinosaurs means. Yet dinosaurs are not true lizards, and they are not necessarily terrible, either. Paleontologists have overturned many misconceptions, and in Dinosaurs!, we look at what the latest research tells us and what we still have to learn about these endlessly fascinating creatures.

The Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, and the yeti have long held a fascination for people the world over. Debates about their actual existence or what they might really be have continued for decades, if not centuries. Known also as cryptids, they have spawned a body of research known as cryptozoology.

Journalist Susan Casey was in her living room when she first glimpsed this strange place and its resident sharks, their dark fins swirling around a tiny boat in a documentary. These great whites were the alphas among alphas, the narrator said, some of them topping 18 feet in length, and each fall they congregated here off the northern California coast.

Presenter Brett Westwood joins forces with BAFTA award-winning producer and naturalist Stephen Moss for six delightful and informative series, introducing us to some of Britain's most popular and best-loved birds. Together with wildlife sound recordist Chris Moss, they tour the UK, tracking down the rich variety of species that make their home there - from garden and woodland birds to ones that live on water, by the coast, on farms and in the mountains and moors.

Wishing to leave behind the quiet isolation of her Orkney island life, Amy Liptrot books a one-way flight to Berlin. Searching for new experiences, inspiration and love, she rents a loftbed in a shared flat and looks for work. She explores the streets, nightclubs and parks and seeks out the city’s wildlife—goshawks, raccoons and hooded crows. She looks for love through the screen of her laptop. Over the course of a year, Amy makes space, hoping for the unexpected. And it comes with an erotic jolt, in the form of a love affair that obsesses her.

In this New York Times best seller, a naturalist probes the forest to comprehend the secret lives of owls. Leigh Calvez takes listeners on an adventure into the world of owls: owl-watching, avian science, and the deep forest - often in the dead of night. These birds are a bit mysterious, and that's part of what makes them so fascinating.

The first book to reveal the hidden world of sharks, Emperors of the Deep draws upon the latest scientific research to examine four species in detail - mako, tiger, hammerhead and great white - as never before. An eye-opening tour of shark habitats ranges from the coral reefs of the Central Pacific where great whites mysteriously congregate every autumn, to tropical mangrove forests where baby lemon sharks play in social groups and to the frigid waters of the North Atlantic, home to 400-year-old Greenland sharks, the world’s longest-lived vertebrates.

Stepping beyond the shape of a footprint and into the unseen story of the track, veteran wilderness guide Tamarack Song takes you inside the eyes and mind of an intuitive tracker, with intimate stories where Frogs show the way out of the woods, scat reveals life histories, and Bears demonstrate how to find missing people.

It all started with a Hob Nob. As Dr Matt Morgan, an intensive care consultant, examined a patient who had suffered a cardiac arrest after inhaling some biscuit crumbs, he saw a flock of birds fly past the window. They must inhale objects all the time when flying, how do they survive? he thought to himself. This began an investigation that spanned continents, species and millennia. For animal science has so much to teach us about human medicine. While some of the overlaps and parallels are obvious, there is so much more that we have learnt from the animal world.

If you are at all interested in life on our planet, then you need to know about insects. They are the most successful group of animals ever to have lived on Earth. Making up three quarters of all animal species, insects conquered the planet long ago. They were among the very first animals to appear on land and were the first to take to the air. Their total biomass is at least 10 times that of all humans and our livestock combined.