Showing titles in Animals

Mama's Last Hug opens with the dramatic farewell between Mama, a dying 59-year-old chimpanzee matriarch, and biologist Jan Van Hooff. This heartfelt final meeting of two longtime friends offers a window into how deep and instantly recognizable these bonds can be. So begins Frans de Waal's whirlwind tour of new ideas and findings about animal emotions, based on his renowned studies of the social and emotional lives of chimpanzees, bonobos, and other primates.

In early 2020, wildlife cameraman James Aldred was commissioned to film the lives of a family of Goshawks in the New Forest, his childhood home. He began to plan a treetop hide in a remote site that would allow him to film the Gos nest, the newly hatched chicks and the lives of these elusive and enchanting birds. Then lockdown. And as the world retreated, something remarkable happened. The noise of our everyday stilled. No more cars, no more off-roaders, no more airplanes roaring in the skies, no one in the Goshawk woods–except James.

Heiða is a solitary farmer with a flock of 500 sheep in a remorseless area bordering Iceland's highlands. It's known as the End of the World. One of her nearest neighbours is Iceland's most notorious volcano, Katla, which has periodically driven away the inhabitants of Ljótarstaðir ever since people first started farming there in the 12th century.

Rosemary and Peter Grant and those assisting them have spend 20 years on Daphne Major, an island in the Galapagos, studying natural selection. They recognize each individual bird on the island, when there are 400 at the time of the author's visit or when there are over a thousand. They have observed about 20 generations of finches - continuously.Jonathan Weiner follows these scientists as they watch Darwin's finches and come up with a new understanding of life itself.

In Birding Under the Influence, Dorian Anderson, a neuroscience researcher on a pressure-filled life trajectory, walks away from the world of elite institutions, research labs, and academic publishing. In doing so, he falls in love and discovers he has freed himself to embrace his lifelong passion for birding.

In the last few decades, a wealth of new information has emerged about who animals are: astounding beings with intelligence, emotions, intricate communications networks, and myriad abilities. In Animalkind, Ingrid Newkirk and Gene Stone present these findings in a concise and awe-inspiring way, detailing a range of surprising discoveries, like that geese fall in love and stay with a partner for life, that fish “sing” underwater, and that elephants use their trunks to send subsonic signals, alerting other herds to danger miles away.

Když se v roce 1956 budoucí slavná Elsa narodila, byla už Joy Adamsonová známou ochránkyní zvířat. Lvíče nešťastnou náhodou spolu se svými dvěma bratry přišlo o matku a manželé Adamsonovi je zachránili a vychovali. Lvy poslali do evropské zoologické zahrady a Elsa zůstala s nimi. Byť se u nich měla skvěle a dávali jí v rámci možností velkou svobodu a volnost, snažili se přesto v Else rozvinout její přirozené lovecké instinkty tak, aby později mohla žít nezávisle, protože byli přesvědčeni, že zvířata ze zajetí mají být vrácena do volné přírody.

No one is better than Dr. Marc Bekoff at turning state-of-the-art animal science into practical, digestible information. His subjects include dog care, dog cognition and emotions, and dog-human relationships, and though he has impressive scientific credentials and much technical expertise, this is the accessible book that every dog lover should have.

Dinosaurs, with their awe-inspiring size, terrifying claws and teeth, and otherworldly abilities, occupy a sacred place in our childhoods. They loom over museum halls, thunder through movies, and are a fundamental part of our collective imagination. In My Beloved Brontosaurus, the dinosaur fanatic Brian Switek enriches the childlike sense of wonder these amazing creatures instill in us. Investigating the latest discoveries in paleontology, he breathes new life into old bones.

Insects are dying off at an apocalyptic rate, or are they? Now there's a way to find out. In this limited series, we go to a remote island rainforest to listen to sound-based research that could reveal the truth about global insect death.

Award-winning author and celebrated neurosurgeon Allan J. Hamilton, MD, combines his understanding of the human brain with nearly 30 years' experience training horses to offer wisdom on such universal themes as leadership, motivation, ambition, and humility. The results are showcased in more than 100 thoughtful essays that treat working with horses as a metaphor for personal, professional, and spiritual growth.

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.

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?

What is animal welfare? This concise and accessible guide is for anyone who is interested in animals and who has wondered how we can assess their welfare scientifically. It defines animal welfare as "health and animals having what they want", a definition that can be easily understood by scientists and non-scientists alike, expresses in simple words what underlies many existing definitions, and shows what evidence we need to collect to improve animal welfare in practice. Above all, it puts the animal's own point of view at the heart of an assessment of its welfare.

Lynn Schooler had recently lost a dear friend and was feeling his marriage slipping away from him when he set out on a daring journey - first by boat, then on foot - into the Alaskan wilderness to clear his head. His solo expedition, recounted in Walking Home, is filled with the awe and danger of being on one's own in the wild, being battered by the elements and even, for two harrowing days, becoming the terrified quarry of a grizzly bear. But the formidable, lonely landscape is also rich with human stories....

In Surviving the Shark, Jonathan Kathrein describes his incredible shark attack experience. The book covers all aspects of Kathrein’s survival, beginning with the eerie moments just before the attack, when something smashes into Kathrein’s hand as he paddles on his board, waiting for a wave off Stinson Beach in northern California. Realizing it is probably shark, and possibly a great white, Kathrein tries to paddle away, furiously trying to make it toward shore, where he sees some of his friends on the beach.

Our sense of smell - or olfaction as it is technically known - is our most enigmatic sense. It can conjure up memories, taking us back to very specific places and emotions, whilst powerful smells can induce strong feelings of hunger or nausea. In the animal kingdom smell can be used to find food, a mate, or a home; to sense danger; and to send and receive complex messages with other members of a species. Yet despite its fundamental importance in our mental life and in the existence of all animals, our scientific understanding of how smell works is limited.

House cats rule back alleys, deserted Antarctic islands, and our bedrooms. Clearly they own the Internet, where a viral cat video can easily be viewed upward of 10 million times. But how did cats accomplish global domination? Unlike dogs, they offer humans no practical benefit. The truth is they are sadly incompetent rat catchers and pose a threat to many ecosystems. Yet we love them still.

Bees are like oxygen: ubiquitous, essential, and, for the most part, unseen. While we might overlook them, they lie at the heart of relationships that bind the human and natural worlds. In Buzz, the beloved Thor Hanson takes us on a journey that begins 125 million years ago, when a wasp first dared to feed pollen to its young. From honeybees and bumbles to lesser-known diggers, miners, leafcutters, and masons, bees have long been central to our harvests, our mythologies, and our very existence. They've given us sweetness and light, the beauty of flowers, and as much as a third of the foodstuffs we eat. And, alarmingly, they are at risk of disappearing.

As spring arrives, Stephen Moss’ Somerset garden is awash with birdsong: chiffchaffs, wrens, robins and more. Overhead, buzzards soar, ravens tumble and the season gathers pace. But this equinox is unlike any other. As the nation goes into lockdown, Stephen records the wildlife around his home, with his fox-red Labrador, Rosie, by his side. When old routines fall away, and blue skies are no longer crisscrossed by contrails, they discover the bumblebees, butterflies and birdsong on their local patch.