Showing 1–12 of 29 results
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Flight Lines: Across the Globe on a Journey with the Astonishing Ultramarathon Birds
Artist/Author: Darby, Andrew$34.00 Add to cartAs the sun lowered and turned Gulf St Vincent fiery, they each called a high-pitched ‘peeooowiii!’, flashed their black wing-pits, spread their tail skirts and took flight.
Andrew Darby follows the odysseys of two Grey Plovers, little-known migratory shorebirds, as they take previously uncharted ultra-marathon flights from the southern coast of Australia to Arctic breeding grounds. On these extraordinary flights they chance predators, typhoon weather and exhaustion before they can breed, and maybe return to familiar southern feeding grounds. But the greatest threat to these, and other long-distance migrants on the flyway, is China’s dragon economy, engulfing their vital Yellow Sea staging spots.
The author meets the dedicated people working to save these intrepid birds, from Russia to Alaska, and the rim of the Arctic Sea to the coasts of the Southern Ocean. Out of their hard-won science he finds hope for the birds – a bright light for our times.
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Gulls (New Naturalist Series)
Artist/Author: Coulson, John C$145.00 Add to cartThe gull is a familiar sight by the seaside, and one of the most recognisable bird species, but most people know surprisingly little about the lives and habits of these seafaring birds. Professor John Coulson remedies this with a comprehensive overview of the gull.
There are more than 50 known species of gulls, and many of these are well-adapted to living in urban areas and in close proximity to humans. But there are also less familiar species to discover, which keep their distance from beachgoers. This long-overdue addition to the New Naturalist library explains the thorny issues of gull taxonomy and classification, then introduces readers to what it means to be a gull, physically and genetically. Chapters are divided by larger gull groups, and within these, distribution, lifecyles and behaviours are examined, as well as acclimation to the human world. Colour photography throughout offers ample opportunity to get a sense of the variation within the gull group, and makes Gulls a pleasure to look through.
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Oceanic Birds of the World: A Photo Guide
Artist/Author: Howell, Steve N G, Kirk Zufelt$68.00 Add to cartOceanic birds are among the most remarkable but least known of all birds, living at sea, far from the sight of most people. They offer unusual identification challenges – many species look similar and it can be difficult to get good views of fast-flying birds from a moving boat. The first field guide to the world’s oceanic birds in more than two decades, this exciting and authoritative book draws on decades of firsthand experience on the open seas. It features clear text filled with original insights and new information and more than 2,200 carefully chosen colour images that bring the ocean and its remarkable winged inhabitants to life. Never before have oceanic birds been presented in such an accessible and comprehensive way.
The introduction discusses the many recent developments in seabird taxonomy, which are incorporated into the species accounts, and these accounts are arranged into groups that aid field identification. Each group and species complex has an introductory overview of its identification challenges, illustrated with clear comparative photos. The text describes flight manner, plumage variation related to age and moult, seasonal occurrence patterns, migration routes, and many other features.
The result is an indispensable guide for exploring birding’s last great frontier.
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Pelican
Artist/Author: Allen, Barbara$25.00 Add to cartWith its distinctive, comical walk, large bill and association with the conservation movement, the pelican has attained iconic status. But the pelican has a chequered history. Classed as ‘unclean’ in the King James Bible, the legend of the compassionate pelican was later appropriated by Christianity to symbolise Christ’s sacrifice. This majestic bird, gifted to British royalty in 1664, has been celebrated in art and literature, from Shakespeare’s King Lear to the writing of Edward Lear, and is the recipient of three Guinness World Records. The pelican’s anatomy has been copied for paper plane construction, aircraft design and in 3d imaging, all while it has fought back from the threat of extinction, habitat destruction and environmental disasters such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Its resilience is as remarkable as its anatomy.
In this must-read book for all bird enthusiasts, Barbara Allen skilfully weaves together wildlife trivia, historical tales and the latest research to provide an engaging account of the cultural and natural history of this emblematic bird.
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Seabirds of the World: Secret Realm of the Oceans’ Wanderers
Artist/Author: Tipling, David$43.00 Add to cartThis book is a visual celebration of seabirds from the tropics to the polar regions, revealing their extraordinary lives in pictures and words. From seabird cities to a lone albatross circumnavigating the globe, each picture not only tells a story but is beautifully crafted.
David Tipling has travelled the world’s oceans and visited remote islands across the globe in order to reveal the secret lives of some of earth’ s most enigmatic species of birds. Seabirds of the World celebrates the lives of these remarkable birds, many of which have populations in crisis.
Never before has such a large group of birds needed such urgent action to save them from the brink of extinction.
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Emperor: The Perfect Penguin
Artist/Author: Flood, Sue$50.00 Add to cartEmperor: The Perfect Penguin is a celebration of one of the world’s most charismatic creatures. In temperatures that can reach -50°C with 150 km/h winds, the emperor penguins’ ability to survive and thrive is nothing short of astounding. Over the past nine years, award-winning photographer Sue Flood has journeyed to remote Antarctic penguin colonies to capture the birds in their native home.
Sue Flood’s respect for her subjects emanates from every page. From the poignant sight of an egg abandoned on the sea ice, to majestic shots of emperor penguins returning from the sea and heart-warming photos of chicks clustering together for warmth, every shot explores a new angle of life in this remote and ice-crusted world.
As well as following the difficult journey of the penguins across the sea ice, Emperor: The Perfect Penguin narrates the hardships that must be endured to catch the perfect photograph. Sue’s behind-the-scenes experiences prove that it is only with patience, endurance, and several thermal layers that one can capture magical moments on Earth’s most inhospitable continent.
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The Seabird’s Cry: The Lives and Loves of Puffins, Gannets and Other Ocean Voyagers
Artist/Author: Nicolson, Adam.$24.00 Add to cartSeabirds are master navigators, thriving in the most demanding environment on earth. In this masterly book, drawing on all the most recent research, Adam Nicolson follows them to the coasts and islands of Scotland, Ireland, Iceland, Norway, and the Americas. Extinction stalks the ocean and there is a danger that the grand cry of a seabird colony will this century become little but a memory.
The full story of seabirds from one the greatest nature writers. The book looks at the pattern of their lives, their habitats, the threats they face and the passions they inspire. Seabirds have always entranced the human imagination and over the last couple of decades, modern science has begun to understand them: their epic voyages, their astonishing abilities to navigate for tens of thousands of miles on a featureless sea, their ability to smell their way towards fish and home. Comprising of ten chapters, each dedicated to a different bird, and each beautifully illustrated by Kate Boxer, the reader travels the ocean paths, looking at the way their bodies work, the sense of their own individuality, the strategies and tactics needed to survive and thrive in the most demanding environment on earth. At the heart of the book are the Shiant Isles, a cluster of Hebridean islands in the Minch but Nicolson has pursued the birds much further-across the Atlantic, up the west coast of Ireland, to St Kilda, Orkney, Shetland, the Faeroes, Iceland and Norway; to the eastern seaboard of Maine and to Newfoundland, to the Falklands, South Georgia, the Canaries and the Azores-reaching out across the widths of the world ocean which is the seabirds’ home. But a global tragedy is unfolding. Even as we are coming to understand them, the number of seabirds is in freefall, dropping by nearly 70% in the last sixty years, a billion fewer now than there were in 1950. Of the ten birds in this book, seven are in decline, at least in part of their range.
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The Eastern Curlew: The Extraordinary Life of a Migratory Bird
Artist/Author: Saddler, Harry$30.00 Add to cartEvery year around August, large flocks of Eastern Curlews leave their breeding grounds in the Arctic and embark on a perilous 10,000 km journey to the coast of Australia. The birds cannot swim; if they become exhausted and fall into the ocean, they die. But it’s a journey they have taken for tens of thousands of years, tracing invisible flyways in the sky in what is one of the most spectacular mass migrations in the animal kingdom.
Following the Eastern Curlew along its migratory path, award-winning nature writer Harry Saddler explores how these incredible birds have impressed themselves on the cultures of the countries they fly through, the threat to their survival posed by development, and the remarkable ways these birds and humankind may be entwined. The Eastern Curlew: The Extraordinary Life of a Migratory Bird is a delightful and vivid portrait of a fascinating natural phenomenon.
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Gulls of the World: A Photographic Guide
Artist/Author: Olsen, Klaus Malling$75.00 Add to cartThis book represents the definitive photographic guide to gulls, by the world’s greatest authority on gull identification, Klaus Malling Olsen.
This outstanding guide covers all of the world’s gull species, tackling some of the most notoriously difficult identification and taxonomic challenges in birding. Concise text – complemented by an accurate colour range map – places particular emphasis on field identification, with detailed discussion of variation, and coverage of habitat, status and distribution. Each photograph has been carefully selected to highlight identification criteria and, crucially, to allow age and subspecific separation in the field. This book is an invaluable tool for identifying gulls, featuring the most sought-after rarities as well as beautiful, easy-to-identify species.
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Far from Land: The Mysterious Lives of Seabirds
Artist/Author: Brooke, Michael$71.00 Add to cartSeabirds evoke the spirit of the earth’s wildest places. They spend large portions of their lives at sea, often far from land, and nest on beautiful and remote islands that humans rarely visit. Thanks to the development of increasingly sophisticated and miniaturised devices that can track their every movement and behaviour, it is now possible to observe the mysterious lives of these remarkable creatures as never before. This beautifully illustrated book takes you on a breathtaking journey around the globe to reveal where these birds actually go when they roam the sea, the tactics they employ to traverse vast tracts of ocean, the strategies they use to evade threats, and more.
Featuring illustrations by renowned artist Bruce Pearson and packed with intriguing facts, Far from Land provides an extraordinary up-close look at the activities of seabirds.
‘Knowledge about the lives of seabirds has taken a quantum leap in the past two decades, with technological advances providing details of seabird activity when they are far from land. Brooke’s book engagingly discusses how these recent findings have transformed our understanding of seabird natural history.’ George Divoky, Founder and Director of Friends of Cooper Island
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The Seabird’s Cry: The Lives and Loves of Puffins, Gannets and Other Ocean Voyagers
Artist/Author: Nicolson, Adam.$36.00 Add to cartSeabirds are master navigators, thriving in the most demanding environment on earth. In this masterly book, drawing on all the most recent research, Adam Nicolson follows them to the coasts and islands of Scotland, Ireland, Iceland, Norway, and the Americas. Extinction stalks the ocean and there is a danger that the grand cry of a seabird colony will this century become little but a memory.
The full story of seabirds from one the greatest nature writers. The book looks at the pattern of their lives, their habitats, the threats they face and the passions they inspire. Seabirds have always entranced the human imagination and over the last couple of decades, modern science has begun to understand them: their epic voyages, their astonishing abilities to navigate for tens of thousands of miles on a featureless sea, their ability to smell their way towards fish and home. Comprising of ten chapters, each dedicated to a different bird, and each beautifully illustrated by Kate Boxer, the reader travels the ocean paths, looking at the way their bodies work, the sense of their own individuality, the strategies and tactics needed to survive and thrive in the most demanding environment on earth. At the heart of the book are the Shiant Isles, a cluster of Hebridean islands in the Minch but Nicolson has pursued the birds much further-across the Atlantic, up the west coast of Ireland, to St Kilda, Orkney, Shetland, the Faeroes, Iceland and Norway; to the eastern seaboard of Maine and to Newfoundland, to the Falklands, South Georgia, the Canaries and the Azores-reaching out across the widths of the world ocean which is the seabirds’ home. But a global tragedy is unfolding. Even as we are coming to understand them, the number of seabirds is in freefall, dropping by nearly 70% in the last sixty years, a billion fewer now than there were in 1950. Of the ten birds in this book, seven are in decline, at least in part of their range. Available in paperback (Stock ID 18006)
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Project Puffin: The Improbable Quest to Bring a Beloved Seabird Back to Egg Rock
Artist/Author: Kress, Stephen W. and Derrick Z. Jackson.$55.00 Add to cartThis is the inspiring story of how a beloved seabird was restored to long-abandoned nesting colonies off the Maine coast. As a young ornithology instructor at the Hog Island Audubon Camp, Dr. Stephen W. Kress learned that puffins had nested on nearby islands until hunters drove them away in the late 1800s. To right this environmental wrong, Kress resolved to bring puffins back to Eastern Egg Rock. Yet bringing the plan to fruition meant convincing skeptics, finding resources, and inventing restoration methods at a time when many believed in “letting nature take its course.” Today, Project Puffin has restored more than 1,000 puffin pairs to three Maine islands. Even more exciting is that techniques developed during the project have helped to restore rare and endangered seabirds worldwide. Further, reestablished puffins now serve as a window into the effects of climate change. The success of Dr. Kress’s project offers hope that people can restore lost wildlife populations and the habitats that support them. The need for such inspiration has never been greater.
