Science Ecology

In Return to the Sky, Tina Morris, one of the first women to engage in a raptor reintroduction program, shares her remarkable story that is as much about the human spirit as it is about birds of prey.

Owls have existed for over sixty million years, and in the relatively short time we have shared the planet with these majestic birds they have ignited the human imagination. But even as owls continue to captivate our collective consciousness, celebrated British nature writer Miriam Darlington finds herself struck by all she doesn't know about the true nature of these enigmatic creatures.

Flowers, and the fruits that follow, feed, clothe, sustain, and inspire all humanity. Flowers are used to celebrate all-important occasions, to express love, and are also the basis of global industries. Americans buy 10 million flowers a day, and perfumes are a worldwide industry worth $30 billion annually. Stephen Buchmann takes us along on an exploratory journey of the roles flowers play in the production of our foods, spices, medicines, and perfumes while simultaneously bringing joy and health.

The shift from the Paleolithic to Neolithic periods represents a watershed moment in human history. While many may consider the humans of both stone ages to be unintelligent barbarians, this brief history proves that the humans of yesteryear were just as smart as we are today. Between 10,000 BC and 2,000 BC, they instituted revolutionary changes in human life. All over the globe, formerly nomadic people began settling into villages, farming, and creating high-tech stone inventions.

Roger Fouts fulfilled humankind's age-old dream of talking to animals by pioneering communication with chimpanzees through sign language. Now, in Next of Kin, Fouts tells the dramatic story of his odyssey from novice researcher to celebrity scientist and caretaker of a family of chimpanzees, to his impassioned awakening as a crusader for the rights of animals.

How did we get here? All cultures have a creation story, but a little over 150 years ago, Charles Darwin introduced a revolutionary new one. We, and all living things, exist because of the action of evolution on the first simple life form and its descendants. In How Evolution Explains Everything About Life, leading biologists and New Scientist take you on a journey of a lifetime, exploring the questions of whether life is inevitable or a one-off fluke and how it got kick-started.

For thousands of years, humans have been the architects of the natural world. Our activities have permanently altered the environment – for good and for bad. Nature’s Ghosts examines how the planet would have looked before humans scrubbed away its diversity: from landscapes carved out by megafauna to the primeval forests that emerged following the last ice age, and from the eagle-haunted skies of the Dark Ages to the flower-decked farms of more recent centuries.

A small reptile scurries across a rock under the hot sun. It's a lizard! Learn more about these desert animals.

A few years ago, award-winning scientist Richard Fortey purchased four acres of woodland in the Chiltern Hills of Oxfordshire, England. The Wood for the Trees is the joyful, lyrical portrait of what he found there. With one chapter for each month, we move through the seasons: tree felling in January, moth hunting in June, finding golden mushrooms in September.

Find out how animals survive Earth's most extreme regions! From the rain-drenched treetops to the sun-starved forest floor, the rain forest is a tough place to live. But many animals from geckos to jaguars thrive in this environment. Discover the amazing body parts and behaviors that make living there possible.

After a chance meeting in the pub, Roger Morgan-Grenville and his friend Duncan decide to take up beekeeping. Their enthusiasm matched only by their ignorance, they are pitched into an arcane world of unexpected challenges. Coping with many setbacks along the way, they manage to create a colony of beehives, finishing two years later with more honey than anyone knows what to do with. By standing back from their normal lives and working with the cycle of the seasons, they emerge with a new-found understanding of nature and a respect for the honeybee and the threats it faces.

Even if we've never had direct contact with one, we will have seen one, or at the very least, heard one. For those of us who live in the Western world, it is more than likely that one sleeps in our house, possibly even on our bed. I'm talking, of course, of the dog. Yet, this animal, which lives alongside 500 million of us all over the world - as an invaluable partner and a trusted confidant - presents us with one great unsolved mystery: how did this relationship - the most complex and enduring of any between human and animal - start in the first place?

Moonchild Irene Slade has nothing left to lose — not family, not home, not even the solace of blame. Alpha Centauri is far from no one she loves. When a disenfranchised pilot, kept at the margins of the mission’s briefings, has an encounter with an intelligent alien species, the result is catastrophic. Lives are lost. Truth is buried. And guilt becomes Irene's legacy. Among the dead was a friend... A sister... An aunt... So Irene bends protocol and invokes her override—bringing two young women into a mission strained by silence. Their presence is a quiet act of atonement… and a ...

New York Times best-selling author Seth Siegel tells how contaminants got in our drinking water, what they’re doing to us, and what we must do to make our water safe.

The universal appeal of Laura Ingalls Wilder springs from a life lived in partnership with the land, on farms she and her family settled across the Northeast and Midwest. In this revealing exploration of Wilder's deep connection with the natural world, Marta McDowell follows the wagon trail of the beloved Little House series. You'll learn details about Wilder's life and inspirations, pinpoint the Ingalls and Wilder homestead claims on authentic archival maps, and learn to grow the plants and vegetables featured in the series. Excerpts from Wilder's books, letters, and diaries bring to light her profound appreciation for the landscapes at the heart of her world.

A century ago, mountain lions were vilified as a threat to livestock and hunted to the verge of extinction. Its recovery has led to an unexpected conundrum: Do more mountain lions mean they're a threat to humans and domestic animals? Or, are mountain lions still in need of our help and protection as their habitat dwindles? Mountain lion biologist and expert Mark Elbroch welcomes these tough questions. He dismisses long-held myths about mountain lions and uses groundbreaking science to uncover important new information about their social habits.

In Our Kindred Creatures, Bill Wasik, editorial director of The New York Times Magazine, and veterinarian Monica Murphy offer a fascinating history of this crusade and the battles it sparked in American life. On the side of reform were such leaders as George Angell, the inspirational head of Massachusetts’s animal-welfare society and the American publisher of the novel Black Beauty; Henry Bergh, founder of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; Caroline White of Philadelphia, who fought against medical experiments that used live animals; and many more.

Ancient writers observed that forests always recede as civilizations develop and grow. The great Roman poet Ovid wrote that before civilization began, “even the pine tree stood on its own very hills” but when civilization took over, “the mountain oak, the pine were felled.” This happened for a simple reason: trees have been the principal fuel and building material of every society over the millennia, from the time urban areas were settled until the middle of the nineteenth century. To this day trees still fulfill these roles for a good portion of the world’s population.

In this joyous journey around the wild edges of Britain, Christopher Hart takes us through the life, ecology and history of the humble British hedge, showing us how this much-loved (but somewhat overlooked) feature is inextricably woven into our language, history and culture. Hedges – or hedgerows – have long been an integral part of the British landscape; a bastion of privacy for our gardens, a protective presence on winding country lanes and a vital hiding place for birds and beasts on farmland.

The Reindeer Chronicles takes listeners on a global tour of Earth repair, with visits to unsung heroes who are pushing the boundaries of ecological restoration to show how even the world’s most wounded places can be revived. The book begins in China’s Loess Plateau, where a landmark project successfully restored a blighted region the size of Belgium, lifting millions of people out of poverty.