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Books > Sport & Leisure > Natural history, country life & pets > Wild animals
All NEW from Kate Frost. Follow your heart and then your
dreams...'A perfect escape to Italy, with sunshine, devastating
secrets, tears, smiles and a hero you will fall in love with.' -
Jennifer Bohnet 'A beautiful novel about life choices and moving
on, set on the sundrenched island of Capri. Should be read by a
pool with a glass of Prosecco in one hand' - T.A. Williams 'A
lovely escapist tale full of heart, friendship and promise' - Annie
Robertson Best friends since childhood, Fern Chambers and Stella
Shaw have been through everything together and are at a crossroads
in their lives. Carefree Stella has a monumental secret and down
trodden Fern's happy life is not all it seems. With their 40th
birthdays approaching, a luxury holiday to the island of Capri is a
chance for them to reconnect, let their hair down and celebrate in
style. But untold truths and frustration bubble beneath the
surface, turning what should be a holiday of a lifetime into an
opportunity to make life-changing decisions. Far from home, where
anything feels possible, secrets are revealed, heartache is shared,
love discovered and new friendships forged. Will their Italian
dream turn into a nightmare or lead to newfound happiness?
World Oceans: A Reference Handbook offers an in-depth discussion of
the world's oceans. It discusses the marine life that is dependent
on the sea as well as the problems threatening the health of the
ocean and its wildlife. World Oceans: A Reference Handbook opens
with an overview of the history of human knowledge and
understanding of the oceans and cryosphere, along with related
scientific, technological, social, political, and other factors.
The second chapter presents and discusses about a dozen major
problems facing the Earth's oceans today, along with possible
solutions. The third chapter provides interested individuals with
an opportunity to express their thoughts and ideas on today's ocean
issues, and remaining chapters provide additional resources, such
as a bibliography, a chronology, and a glossary, to assist the
reader in her or his further study of the issue. Where most books
for young adults learning about world oceans take a purely
expository treatment, this book provides readers with additional
information as well as resources, allowing them to learn more and
inform further study of the subject. Provides readers with the
basic background they need about the oceans and cryosphere in order
to understand current problems Includes additional readings, a
comprehensive chronology, a glossary, and other additional features
to aid students' understanding of current issues and to guide them
in designing and conducting their own research on more detailed
aspects of the topic Offers ideas for additional research from a
list of important individuals and organizations Rounds out the
author's expertise in perspectives essays that show readers a
diversity of viewpoints
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Betta Fish
(Hardcover)
Walter James
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Discover nature's most colourful creatures in a major new book on
colour in the animal kingdom. For many animals use of colour is
essential to surviving in the wild. Both a built-in defence
mechanism and a cunning tactic for attack, this biological
advantage helps animals hide from dangerous predators and catch
unsuspecting prey. It is used in many different ways, primarily to
mask one's identity, movement or location, and changes over time as
animals evolve and adapt to live. This stunning photographic
collection reveals 100 creatures from around the world paired with
fascinating insights from leading UK zoology author Steve Parker.
Each animal will have a profile of 300 words paired with striking
photographic examples featuring a wealth of colour and ingenious
uses of colour for display or disguise. Learn how: The octopus can
change its opacity, colour and pattern in response to threats. The
walking leaf insect has evolved a strikingly similar shape and
colour to the leaves it eats. The arctic fox changes its fur colour
to white in the winter, perfectly blending in with the snow - but
climate change is disrupting this age-old adaptation. This study of
some of the most innovative uses of colour by animals, packed with
beautiful photography and fascinating insights, will delight all
lovers of the natural world.
'A funny and beautifully written welcome to the enigmatic, weird
and wonderful world of wasps' DAVE GOULSON, author of SILENT EARTH
There may be no insect with a worse reputation than the wasp, and
none guarding so many undiscovered wonders. Where bees and ants
have long been the darlings of the insect world, wasps are much
older, cleverer and more diverse. They are the bee's evolutionary
ancestors - flying 100 million years earlier - and today they are
just as essential for the survival of our environment. A bee,
ecologist Professor Seirian Sumner argues, is just a wasp that has
forgotten how to hunt. For readers of Entangled Life, Other Minds
and The Gospel of Eels, this is a book to upturn your expectations
about one overlooked animal and the wider architecture of our
natural world. With endless surprises, this book might teach you
about the wasps that spend their entire lives sealed inside a fig,
about stinging wasps, about parasitic wasps, about wasps that turn
cockroaches into living zombies, about how wasps taught us to make
paper. It offers up a maligned insect in all its diverse,
unexpected splendour; as both predator and pollinator, the wasp is
an essential pest controller worldwide. Inside their sophisticated
social worlds is the best model we have for the earth's major
evolutionary transitions. In their understudied biology are clues
to progressing medicine, including a possible cure for cancer. The
closer you look at these spurned, winged insects - both custodians
and bouncers of our planet - the more you see. Their secrets have
so far gone mostly untapped, but the potential of the wasp is
endless.
You don't have to be Paul Bunyan to build a wilderness home. In
fact, you don't even need an ax, and nails are not an absolute
necessity. What you'll need is Wilderness Shelters, the definitive
guide to building log cabins, camping shelters, blockhouses, and
more.Here are illustrated instructions for everything from felling
trees to splitting logs, from laying foundations to insulating
roofs. The book also shows you how to fashion indoor and outdoor
furniture for your rustic retreat, including tables, benches,
bookcases, beds and ice chambers. And it teaches you to obtain food
from nature and dine in comfort.With its wealth of ideas,
Wilderness Shelters shows that wilderness living can be more
efficient than gadget-ridden urban lifestyles.
From the best-selling illustrator of Flip-a-Feather, Mix-a-Mutt,
Flip-o-saurus, and Flip-o-storic comes another book with charming
artwork and die-cut pages for flip-and-flop fun ― this time with
insects! Build-a-Bug lets you create wacky combinations of ten
types of insects, including a curious beetle, a climbing
caterpillar, and a buzzing honey bee. Each flap includes a fun fact
about the pictured species, and inside the front cover is a chart
showing the relative sizes of the insects featured, from the ant to
the praying mantis.
'Somehow, the elephants got into my soul, and it became my life's
work to see them safe and happy. There was no giving up on that
vision, no matter how hard the road was at times.' Francoise
Malby-Anthony is the owner of a game reserve in South Africa with a
remarkable family of elephants whose adventures have touched hearts
around the world. The herd's feisty matriarch Frankie knows who's
in charge at Thula Thula, and it's not Francoise. But when Frankie
becomes ill, and the authorities threaten to remove or cull some of
the herd if the reserve doesn't expand, Francoise is in a race
against time to save her beloved elephants . . . The joys and
challenges of a life dedicated to conservation are vividly
described in The Elephants of Thula Thula. The search is on to get
a girlfriend for orphaned rhino Thabo - and then, as his behaviour
becomes increasingly boisterous, a big brother to teach him
manners. Francoise realizes a dream with the arrival of Savannah
the cheetah - an endangered species not seen in the area since the
1940s - and finds herself rescuing meerkats kept as pets. But will
Thula Thula survive the pandemic, an invasion from poachers and the
threat from a mining company wanting access to its land? As
Francoise faces her toughest years yet, she realizes once again
that with their wisdom, resilience and communal bonds, the
elephants have much to teach us. 'Enthralling' - Daily Mail
Originally published in 2004, the Kingdon Pocket Guide to African
Mammals quickly became the field guide of choice to take on African
safaris. Its compact format makes it ideal for use in the field,
while its coverage is the most comprehensive currently possible in
this format. Adapted from the Kingdon Field Guide to African
Mammals, the greatly condensed text focuses on essential
information such as identification and distribution, while the
author's superb illustrations have been rearranged into an
easy-to-use plate format and placed opposite the text. Complex and
more obscure groups like the bats and certain rodent families are
summarised by genera. Over 500 maps plot the distribution of all
larger species, and for smaller mammals the maps show distribution
by genus. This is a completely revised second edition of this
popular guide. The information and taxonomy have been updated to
follow the newly published second edition of the Kingdon Field
Guide to African Mammals (2015), and this new edition of the pocket
guide contains several new species and illustrations. The maps have
been completely replaced and there are now 200 more maps than in
the original edition.
Powerfully moving, Elephant Dawn is the complete, unforgettable
story of one woman’s remarkable and life-changing association with
the Presidential Elephants of Zimbabwe, a celebrated clan of wild,
free-roaming giants. It comes at a time when elephants all around
Africa face the very real threat of being poached to extinction for
their ivory, and Zimbabwe continues to face tumultuous times. In
2001, Sharon Pincott traded her privileged life as a high-flying
corporate executive to start a new one with the Presidential
Elephants of Zimbabwe. She was unpaid, untrained, self-funded and
arrived with the starry-eyed idealism of most foreigners during
early encounters with Africa. For thirteen years – the worst in
Zimbabwe’s volatile history – this intrepid Australian woman lived
in the Hwange bush, fighting for the lives of these elephants,
forming an extraordinary and life-changing bond with them. Now
remote from Robert Mugabe’s rule, Sharon writes without restraint
sequentially through the years, taking us on a truly unforgettable
ride of hope and heartbreak, profound love and loss, adversity and
new beginnings. This is the haunting, all-encompassing story we’ve
been waiting for.
Birds are intelligent, sociable creatures that exhibit a wide array
of behaviours - from mobbing and mimicking to mating and joint
nesting. Why do they behave as they do? Bringing to light the
remarkable actions of birds through examples from species around
the world, How To Read a Bird presents engaging vignettes about the
private lives of birds, all explained in an evolutionary context.
Richly illustrated, this book explores the increasing focus on how
individual birds differ in personality and how big data and citizen
scientists are helping to add to what we know about them.
This book takes into consideration training the gaited horse for
the trail or the rail for a show horse. The book is a detailed look
at the gaits of the Tennessee Walking Horse, Missouri Fox Trotter,
and the Rocky Mountain Horse. More importantly the book teaches you
a training program that is easy to follow for a smooth easy gaited
horse. You will have a complete understanding of the gaits and
problem solving at your fingertips. No matter what your training
goal are, trail riding or showing. This book will help you
understand gaits, training and retraining for a great gaited horse.
Consider your horse natural ability and train to a sound standard
that matches that ability. Teaching your horse to flat foot walk is
fun and easy following the method described in this book. Enjoy the
journey be safe and have fun.
Most of the world's exquisite and rare bird species are found in
tropical rainforests - the Amazon, Sumatra, Borneo, Daintree
Rainforest in Australia, and the Congo basin in Africa. These lush,
wet biospheres are home to some of the most colourful creatures on
our planet. Did you know that parrots can live for 80 years or
more? Or that most tropical birds are omnivores and will eat seeds,
nuts, fruit and insects, while a few will eat small lizards or
animals? The world's longest parrot is the stunningly bright
hyacinth macaw (Anodorhynchus hyacinthinus), checking in at more
than a metre from tip to tail. From the screeching red-and-green
macaw to the majestic great hornbill, from the rainbow lorikeet of
northern Queensland to the endangered Spix's macaw of the Amazonian
rainforest, Tropical Birds explores the fascinating lifecycles,
diets and, where applicable, migratory patterns, of hundreds of
species from every part of the tropical belt. With full captions
explaining the origins, habitat and behaviour of these exotic
creatures, Tropical Birds is a concise exploration in 180 brilliant
photographs.
'Steve Brusatte, the author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs,
brings mammals out from the shadow of their more showy predecessors
in a beautifully written book that . . . makes the case for them as
creatures who are just as engaging as dinosaurs.' - The Sunday
Times, 'Best Books For Summer' 'In this terrific new book, Steve
Brusatte . . . brings well-known extinct species, the sabre-toothed
tigers and the woolly mammoths, thrillingly back to life' - The
Times The passing of the age of the dinosaurs allowed mammals to
become ascendant. But mammals have a much deeper history. They -
or, more precisely, we - originated around the same time as the
dinosaurs, over 200 million years ago; mammal roots lie even
further back, some 325 million years. Over these immense stretches
of geological time, mammals developed their trademark features:
hair, keen senses of smell and hearing, big brains and sharp
intelligence, fast growth and warm-blooded metabolism, a
distinctive line-up of teeth (canines, incisors, premolars,
molars), mammary glands that mothers use to nourish their babies
with milk, qualities that have underlain their success story. Out
of this long and rich evolutionary history came the mammals of
today, including our own species and our closest cousins. But
today's 6,000 mammal species - the egg-laying monotremes including
the platypus, marsupials such as kangaroos and koalas that raise
their tiny babies in pouches, and placentals like us, who give
birth to well-developed young - are simply the few survivors of a
once verdant family tree, which has been pruned both by time and
mass extinctions. In The Rise and Reign of the Mammals,
palaeontologist Steve Brusatte weaves together the history and
evolution of our mammal forebears with stories of the scientists
whose fieldwork and discoveries underlie our knowledge, both of
iconic mammals like the mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers of which
we have all heard, and of fascinating species that few of us are
aware of. For what we see today is but a very limited range of the
mammals that have existed; in this fascinating and ground-breaking
book, Steve Brusatte tells their - and our - story.
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