Animals

The dinosaurs. 66 million years ago, the Earth's most fearsome and spectacular creatures vanished. Today their extraordinary true story remains one of our planet's great mysteries. In this stunning narrative spanning more than 200 million years....

In this first volume of his memoirs, then-newly-qualified vet James Herriot arrives in the small Yorkshire village of Darrowby, and he has no idea what to expect....

The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every kind of animal, including humans, is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of our immense world....

A moving and fascinating meditation on freedom, trust, loss, and our relationship with the natural world, Raising Hare is explored through the story of one woman’s unlikely friendship with a wild hare.

Both a captivating narrative and a book of environmental and historical significance, American Buffalo tells us as much about ourselves as Americans as it does about the creature who perhaps best of all embodies the American ethos....

A gorgeously composed look at the longstanding relationship between prehistoric plants and life on Earth.

David Starr Jordan was a taxonomist, a man possessed with bringing order to the natural world. In time, he would be credited with discovering nearly a fifth of the fish known to humans in his day. When his specimen collections were demolished, many might have given up....

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Genius of Birds and The Bird Way comes a brilliant scientific investigation into owls—the most elusive of birds—and why they exert such a hold on human imagination....

From the number-one New York Times best-selling author of The Perfect Horse and The Eighty-Dollar Champion comes the triumphant true story of a woman who rode her horse across America in the 1950s, fulfilling her dying wish to see the Pacific Ocean....

James Herriot has now become firmly established and accepted as one of Darrowby's veterinarians. He's also married, and lives with his wife Helen on the top floor of Skeldale House...

In Your Dog Is Your Mirror, dog trainer Kevin Behan proposes a radical new model for understanding canine behavior: a dog’s behavior and emotion, indeed its very cognition, are driven by our emotion....

Expert beekeeper and swarm-catcher Hilary Kearney offers a unique window into the social lives and biology of these remarkable creatures.

When Chris McDougall agreed to take in a donkey from an animal hoarder, he thought it would be no harder than the rest of the adjustments he and his family had made after moving from Philadelphia to the heart of Pennsylvania Amish country....

Through vivid stories of devoted pigs, two-timing magpies, and scheming roosters, The Inner Life of Animals weaves research into animal behavior with Wohlleben's personal experiences....

Here's a third delightful volume of memoirs rich with James Herriot's own brand of humor, insight, and wisdom, and the basis for the PBS Masterpiece drama....

Somewhere deep inside, you know what your gift, purpose, and mission are. Boyd Varty, a lion tracker and life coach, reveals how the wisdom from the ancient art of tracking can teach you how to recognize these essential ingredients in a meaningful life....

Delve into the magical, unforgettable world of James Herriot, the world's most beloved veterinarian, and his menagerie of heartwarming, funny, and tragic animal patients....

The nation’s greatest voice, David Attenborough, reads a brand-new edition of Life on Earth, now available as an audiobook for the first time....

The New York Times bestselling author of Genome and The Evolution of Everything revisits Darwin’s revelatory theory of mate choice through the close study of the peculiar rituals of birds, and considers how this mating process complicates our own view of human evolution.

From the bestselling author of The Clockwork Universe and The Writing of the Gods comes a historical adventure story about the eccentric Victorians who discovered dinosaur bones, leading to a whole new understanding of human history....

This memoir is soaked in the sunshine of Corfu, where Gerald Durrell lived as a boy, surrounded by his eccentric family....

Remarkable new discoveries affirm the octopus as one of nature’s most intelligent and complex animals. This new book brings us closer than ever to these elusive creatures.

In The Secret Wisdom of Nature, master storyteller and international sensation Peter Wohlleben takes listeners on a thought-provoking exploration of the vast natural systems that make life on Earth possible....

All Things Bright and Beautiful is the beloved sequel to Herriot's first collection, All Creatures Great and Small, and picks up as Herriot, now newly married, journeys among the remote hillside farms and valley towns of the Yorkshire Dales, caring for their inhabitants....

To better understand the inner workings of our bodies and to trace the origins of many of today's most common diseases, we have to turn to unexpected sources....

Jack Olsen's true account, traces the causes of the tragic night in August 1967 when two separate and unrelated campers, a distance apart, were savagely mangled and killed by enraged bears. The award-winning author of thirty-three books, Jack Olsen’s books have published in fifteen countries and eleven languages. Olsen's journalism earned the National Headliners Award, Chicago Newspaper Guild's Page One Award, commendations from Columbia and Indiana Universities, the Washington State Governor's Award, the Scripps-Howard Award and other honors.

In all animals, mating is a deal. But few creatures behave as if sex is a simple, even mutually beneficial, transaction. Many more treat it with reverence, suspicion, angst, and violence. In the case of the Black Grouse, the bird at the center of Matt Ridley’s investigation, the males dance and sing for hours a day, for several exhausting months, in an arduous and even deadly ritual called a “lek.” To prepare for the ordeal, they grow, preen and display fancy, twisted, bold-colored feathers. When achieved, consummation with a female takes seconds.

We can all agree—birds are terrible. They're stupid and won't shut up. Featuring fifty of the absolute worst birds to fly the earth, Kracht identifies each of their most terrible qualities, details exactly why they suck, and shows you why. Including all-new, all-worst fowl, such as: the absolute waste of feathers Cruddy Turdstone (Ruddy Turnstone), the utter a-hole Blank Staring-Eyes Flycrapper (Black Paradise Flycatcher), the outright loser Dowdy Woodfucker (Downy Woodpecker), and many more!

"Look at the birds". Through the painful days of the pandemic stuck in her home, Courtney Ellis found herself looking down in despair. Soon after, her beloved grandfather died unexpectedly. It was around this same time that Ellis took up watching birds. "Took up" might not be exactly right—as she puts it, "the switch flipped," and she's been borderline obsessed with birds ever since. Looking Up is a meditation on birding as a practice of hope.

Domesticated since the dawn of man, pigeons have been used as crucial communicators in war by every major historical superpower from ancient Egypt to the United States and are credited with saving thousands of lives. They have been worshipped as fertility goddesses and revered as symbols of peace. Charles Darwin relied heavily on pigeons to help formulate and support his theory of evolution. Yet today they are reviled as "rats with wings."

Rich with insight and packed with tales of birds and of people, this book reveals the great auk’s life before humanity, its death on the killing shores of the North Atlantic, and the unrelenting subsequent quest for its remains. Tim Birkhead’s research has revealed previously unimagined aspects of the bird’s life and also, unexpectedly, its afterlife; in a curious twist, Birkhead found himself the recipient of the archive of the man who accumulated more great auk skins and eggs than anyone else.

If you could pose one question to a dolphin, what would it be? And what might a dolphin ask you? For forty years, researcher and author Denise L. Herzing has investigated these and related questions of marine mammal communication. But the dolphins are not the only ones talking, and in this wide-ranging and accessible book, Herzing explores the astonishing realities of interspecies communication, a skill that humans currently lack.

Este libro descubre la más sucia, sorprendente y festiva intimidad de los seres vivos. Ahí fuera se vive una orgía permanente en la que los chimpancés disfrutan de sus penes con espinas y los patos, de sus enormes sacacorchos; donde los pájaros se ponen los cuernos sin remordimiento alguno y las ranas se hacen las muertas para escapar de los pretendientes más insistentes; en el que los hongos tienen tres, cuatro o hasta miles de sexos, algunos peces cambian de sexo y otros llevan los genitales de sus examantes pegados a sus escamas; donde los zánganos eyaculan tan fuerte que revientan.

Guess what: Bees are incredible. Extreme bee enthusiast and bestselling author Matt Kracht is here to set the record straight with this helpful guidebook to all things bees.

Britain is the home of the badger — there are more badgers per square kilometre in this country than in any other. And yet many of us have never seen one in the wild. They are enigmatic, nocturnal creatures who vanish into their labyrinthine underground setts at the first hint of a human. Here, Patrick Barkham follows in the footsteps of his badger-loving grandmother, to meet the feeders, farmers and scientists who know their way around Badgerlands: the mysterious world in which these distinctively striped creatures live out their lives.