Showing titles in Animals

The latest adventure from bestselling author Ben Fogle explores what we can learn from nature about living well and living wild. What can rowing across the Atlantic teach us about boredom and about patience? Can coming down from Everest take more resilience than climbing up in the first place?...

Winner of the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize Shortlisted for the 2014 Costa Biography Award ‘In real life, goshawks resemble sparrowhawks the way leopards resemble housecats. Bigger, yes. But bulkier, bloodier, deadlier, scarier, and much, much harder to see. Birds of deep woodland, not gardens...

For six years Jim and Jamie Dutcher lived intimately with a pack of wolves, gaining their trust as no one has before. 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.

Beasts in My Belfry is the wonderfully funny memoir about Gerald Durrell's time at Whipsnade Zoo and his experiences as a young zookeeper. Following the Second World War, Durrell joined Whipsnade Zoo as a junior keeper - an opportunity that fulfilled a lifelong dream. Thanks to Rupert Degas's brilliant voicing, which captures all of Durrell's charm and wit, the listener can enjoy being taken behind the scenes of one of the world's very first zoos. This is a delightful portrait of the animals who lived there and those who looked after them.

A straightforward, easy-to-understand book that teaches you how to directly communicate with animals. Animal Talk teaches you how to open the door to your animal friends’ hearts and minds without resorting to magic tricks or wishful thinking. Every creature can be reached through telepathic...

Our dogs mean the world to us and as owners we do our best to make sure they feel happy and loved, whilst also keeping them in line when needed. But wouldn’t it be so much easier if we spoke the same language and could ask what they were thinking or feeling? In his latest book, top dog trainer, Graeme Hall, reveals the secrets to understanding what your furry companion is trying to say and how they see the world. Drawing on 15 years of experience training over 5,000 dogs, and backed up with scientific evidence, he tackles all the tricky questions you’ve ever wanted to ask.

Brought to you by Penguin. Our estate was built on land claimed from fields – we were at the foot of those rolling Kilpatrick hills, but over the roof of the school you could see more green fields and woods. I felt grateful to be on the edge of all that countryside – there was a magnetic...

Dian Fossey's classic account of four gorilla families - one of the most important books ever written about our connection to the natural world. For 13 years Dian Fossey lived and worked with Uncle Bert, Flossie, Beethoven, Pantsy and Digit in the remote rain forests of the volcanic Virunga Mountains in Africa, establishing an unprecedented relationship with these shy and affectionate beasts. In her base camp, 10,000 feet above sea-level, she struggled daily with rain, loneliness and the ever-constant threat of poachers who slaughtered her beloved gorillas with horrifying ferocity.

Adored by children and adults alike, tyrannosaurus is the most famous dinosaur in the world, one that pops up again and again in pop culture, often battling other beasts such as King Kong, triceratops, or velociraptors in Jurassic Park. But despite the hype, tyrannosaurus and the other tyrannosaurs are fascinating animals in their own right and are among the best-studied of all dinosaurs.

Michael McCarthy, one of Britain's leading writers on the environment, proposes this joy as a defence of a natural world which is ever more threatened and which, he argues, is inadequately served by the two defences put forward hitherto: sustainable development and the recognition of ecosystem services. Drawing on a wealth of memorable experiences from a lifetime of watching and thinking about wildlife and natural landscapes, McCarthy presents a new way of looking at the world.

Discover this remarkable account of 21 years in remote Kenya with a troop of Savannah baboons from the New York Times best-selling author of Behave. Brooklyn-born Robert Sapolsky grew up wishing he could live in the primate diorama in the Museum of Natural History. At school he wrote fan letters to primatologists and even taught himself Swahili, all with the hope of one day joining his primate brethren in Africa. But when, at the age of 21, Sapolky's dream finally comes true, he discovers that the African bush bears little resemblance to the tranquillity of a museum. 

'My life is free, random and spontaneous. This in itself creates enormous energy and clarity in body and mind.' (Miriam Lancewood). Miriam Lancewood is a young Dutch woman living a primitive, nomadic life in the heart of the mountains with her New Zealand husband. She lives simply in a tent or hut and survives by hunting wild animals, foraging edible plants and using minimal supplies. For the last six years she has lived this way, through all seasons, often cold, hungry and isolated in the bush.

"Every dog owner should have this book." —Oprah Winfrey, The Oprah Podcast NOW FULLY REVISED AND UPDATED! The beloved #1 New York Times bestseller that “causes one’s dog-loving heart to flutter with astonishment and gratitude” (The New York Times Book Review). The instant classic on the...

In these 24 lectures, The Great Courses teams up with the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute, to take you behind the scenes of the animal world. Dr. Moore has crafted a wonderful introduction to zoology that brings you up close and personal with a breathtaking variety of animal species through the eyes of a trained zoologist.

Follow the trails of hunters - the original storytellers - as they interpret signs, examine tracks, and chase and catch their prey (or fail to). Listeners can curl up with the best authentic hunting fiction and non-fiction, bringing the great Mount Kenya and the prairies of the American Bison into your living room. From Theodore Roosevelt and Gene Hill to Rick Bass and Charles Dickens, remember classic hunting tales and discover new stories of hunters’ luck, camaraderie, and use of smarts on the trail.

Brought to you by Penguin. Animals don't exist to teach us things, but that is what they have always done, and most of what they teach us is what we think we know about ourselves. From the internationally acclaimed author of H is for Hawk comes Vesper Flights, a transcendent collection of essays...

BBC R4 Book of the Week ‘Brilliant’ Guardian ‘Fascinating and often delightful’ The Times What if intelligent life on Earth evolved not once, but twice? The octopus is the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. What can we learn from the encounter? In Other Minds, Peter...

'Jackie Higgins’s lyrical, literate style will charm you while her book stuns your imagination with strange, other-worldly truths' Richard Dawkins Sentient assembles a menagerie of zoological creatures – from land, air, sea and all four corners of the globe – to understand what it means to...

Brought to you by Penguin. Impossible Monsters is the captivating story of the discovery of the dinosaurs and how it upended our understanding of the origins of the world. In 1811, a twelve-year-old girl uncovered some strange-looking bones in Britain’s southern shoreline. They belonged to no...

For most of us, the story of mammal evolution starts after the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs, but over the last 20 years, scientists have uncovered new fossils and used new technologies that have upended this story. In Beasts Before Us, paleontologist Elsa Panciroli charts the emergence of the mammal lineage, Synapsida, beginning at their murky split from the reptiles in the Carboniferous period, over 300 million years ago. They made the world theirs long before the rise of dinosaurs.