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When they met again, she had already become his wife, but he cruelly mocked her. "Lindsey Juhl, you’re not good enough!" After two years of contemplation, she finally saw through this man and left him. But why did this man suddenly chase after her when she was a thousand miles away?
The human history of depicting birds dates to as many as 40,000 years ago, when Paleolithic artists took to cave walls to capture winged and other beasts. But the art form has reached its peak in the last four hundred years. In The Art of the Bird, devout birder and ornithologist Roger J. Lederer celebrates this heyday of avian illustration in forty artists’ profiles, beginning with the work of Flemish painter Frans Snyders in the early 1600s and continuing through to contemporary artists like Elizabeth Butterworth, famed for her portraits of macaws. Stretching its wings across time, taxa, geography, and artistic style—from the celebrated realism of American conservation icon John James Audubon, to Elizabeth Gould’s nineteenth-century renderings of museum specimens from the Himalayas, to Swedish artist and ornithologist Lars Jonsson’s ethereal watercolors—this book is feathered with art and artists as diverse and beautiful as their subjects. A soaring exploration of our fascination with the avian form, The Art of the Bird is a testament to the ways in which the intense observation inherent in both art and science reveals the mysteries of the natural world.
This is a book about spiders and arachnophobia. With a touch of humour, deep curiosity and an artist’s eye the author examines her phobia and the object of her fear. What is a spider? What makes these eight-legged creatures so scary? To understand her own reactions to spiders better she describes her past and present encounters with them. The story takes her back to her childhood in Norway and the USA, to holidays in Spain and Portugal, to travels around Australia, and to her relocation in Tasmania. She focuses on Australian spiders while including fine examples of these astonishing creatures from elsewhere. Hildegunn Hodne, originally from Norway, now calls Tasmania home. She works as a freelance illustrator, writer and portrait artist with studio space in the small village of Chudleigh, Northern Tasmania. To ensure she continues to encounter spiders and local wildlife she also works as a gardener. Spider Stories: My Journey from Phobia to Fascination is her first book. She’s currently working on a new book project, focusing on birds and travels. For more examples of Hildegunn’s artwork please visit her website: hildegunnhodne.com
Breeding on remote ocean islands and spending much of its life foraging for food across vast stretches of seemingly empty seas, the albatross remains a legend for most people. And yet, humans are threatening the albatross family to such an extent that it is currently the most threatened bird group in the world. In this extensively researched, highly readable book, Robin W. Doughty and Virginia Carmichael tell the story of a potentially catastrophic extinction that has been interrupted by an unlikely alliance of governments, conservation groups, and fishermen. Doughty and Carmichael authoritatively establish that the albatross's fate is linked to the fate of two of the highest-value table fis...
Club George is a witty tale about one man's adventures with George, a particularly charismatic Red-winged Blackbird. Wryly humorous and brimming with affection for birds in general and George in particular, this book combines solid natural science with stylish prose and endearing photographs. The cast of characters includes creatures of all kinds, both human and not, and supporting roles are played by Pale Male and Lola, the famous Red-tailed Hawks whose nest was unceremoniously removed from their fancy Fifth Avenue building to a worldwide furor of protest. Both useful and entertaining, Club George covers everything from how to buy binoculars to fascinating trivia about New York's most famous park. This amusing gem will be welcomed by book-buying bird-watchers, Central Park enthusiasts, and armchair nature lovers everywhere.
A leading figure in the emerging field of extinction studies, Thom van Dooren puts philosophy into conversation with the natural sciences and his ethnographic encounters to vivify the cultural and ethical significance of modern-day extinctions. Unlike other meditations on the subject, Flight Ways incorporates the particularities of real animals and their worlds, drawing philosophers, natural scientists, and general readers into the experience of living among and losing biodiversity. Each chapter of Flight Ways focuses on a different species or group of birds: North Pacific albatrosses, Indian vultures, an endangered colony of penguins in Australia, Hawaiian crows, and the iconic whooping cra...
An authoritative and entertaining exploration of Australia’s distinctive birds and their unheralded role in global evolution Renowned for its gallery of unusual mammals, Australia is also a land of extraordinary birds. But unlike the mammals, the birds of Australia flew beyond the continent’s boundaries and around the globe many millions of years ago. This eye-opening book tells the dynamic but little-known story of how Australia provided the world with songbirds and parrots, among other bird groups, why Australian birds wield surprising ecological power, how Australia became a major evolutionary center, and why scientific biases have hindered recognition of these discoveries. From violent, swooping magpies to tool-making cockatoos, Australia’s birds are strikingly different from birds of other lands—often more intelligent and aggressive, often larger and longer-lived. Tim Low, a renowned biologist with a rare storytelling gift, here presents the amazing evolutionary history of Australia’s birds. The story of the birds, it turns out, is inseparable from the story of the continent itself and also the people who inhabit it.
This work is a large, powerfully illustrated interdisciplinary natural sciences volume, the first of its kind to examine the critically important nature of ecological paradox, through an abundance of lenses: the biological sciences, taxonomy, archaeology, geopolitical history, comparative ethics, literature, philosophy, the history of science, human geography, population ecology, epistemology, anthropology, demographics, and futurism. The ecological paradox suggests that the human biological–and from an insular perspective, successful–struggle to exist has come at the price of isolating H. sapiens from life-sustaining ecosystem services, and far too much of the biodiversity with which we...