Birds & Birdwatching

Join the rewilding movement and fill your outdoor space with nature. Wilding your garden will create a little nature reserve and help increase the number of habitats for our wildlife. The Butterfly Brothers are specialists at creating spaces for wildlife; they showed Gardeners' W...orld and Springwatch how to do it, and now they can help you too. If we all made a place for wildlife in our garden, we'd transform levels of biodiversity and help combat wildlife habitat loss, plummeting pollinator numbers, and carbon emissions. But it's not just a question of letting the weeds take over - there's an art and balance to rewilding a garden well so that you can enjoy it too. The Butterfly Brothers are experts at designing wildlife-friendly gardens, and in Wild Your Garden, they show you how to work with nature, support wildlife, and create a self-maintaining, no-dig balance of planting, whether you have a large garden or an urban balcony. Transform a paved-over yard into a lush oasis, create refuges to welcome endangered species, or turn a high-maintenance lawn into a mini-meadow with the potential to absorb carbon and air pollution. The projects don't require specialist gardening knowledge or lots of land, so whatever size space you have, you can rewild your own little corner of the planet. Be inspired to take action by the Butterfly Brothers and discover the beauty and rewards of sharing your space with nature.
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From the New York Times bestselling author of The Genius of Birds, a radical investigation into the bird way of being, and the recent scientific research that is dramatically shifting our understanding of birds - how they live and how they think. 'There is the mammal way and ther...e is the bird way.' This is one scientist's pithy distinction between mammal brains and bird brains- two ways to make a highly intelligent mind. But the bird way is much more than a unique pattern of brain wiring, and lately, scientists have taken a new look at bird behaviours they have, for years, dismissed as anomalies or mysteries. What they are finding is upending the traditional view of how birds conduct their lives, how they communicate, forage, court, breed, survive. They're also revealing the remarkable intelligence underlying these activities, abilities we once considered uniquely our own - deception, manipulation, cheating, kidnapping, infanticide, but also, ingenious communication between species, cooperation, collaboration, altruism, culture, and play. Some of these extraordinary behaviours are biological conundrums that seem to push the edges of- well - birdness- A mother bird that kills her own infant sons, and another that selflessly tends to the young of other birds as if they were her own. Young birds that devote themselves to feeding their siblings and others so competitive they'll stab their nestmates to death. Birds that give gifts and birds that steal, birds that dance or drum, that paint their creations or paint themselves, birds that build walls of sound to keep out intruders and birds that summon playmates with a special call - and may hold the secret to our own penchant for playfulness and the evolution of laughter. Drawing on personal observations, the latest science, and her bird-related travel around the world, from the tropical rainforests of eastern Australia and the remote woodlands of northern Japan, to the rolling hills of lower Austria and the islands of Ala
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Create a flourishing wildlife haven for a wide range of birds. Fill your garden with a variety of local birds by providing them with the environment they need to thrive. Birds need our help, as the numbers of many species are declining. And since it's been proven that listening t...o the calming trill of birdsong is good for us, it's a win-win situation if we give them a hand. You can support bird populations by providing a safe haven that has the best shelter, food, and nesting opportunities for them. How to Attract Birds to Your Garden shows you how to optimize your outdoor space for birds, providing the food and nesting spaces they need to survive. Discover the best plants to grow for food and shelter, which birdfeeders, feed, and nest boxes to buy and how to make them predator-proof, as well as how to encourage diversity and a broad range of bird species. No need to be an expert gardener already, or to break the bank - many of the most beneficial features can be installed easily and cheaply, and many you can build yourself or upcycle to be eco-friendly.
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When wildlife researcher Jonathan Slaght was a young Peace Corps volunteer in the Russian Far East, he caught a brief glimpse of a Blakiston's fish owl. It was the furthest south the species had been documented in over a hundred years, and a chance encounter that would change his... life. In Owls of the Eastern Ice, Slaght tells the story of his decades-long quest to safeguard the world's largest owl from extinction in Primorye, a remote Russian province dominated by Ussuri taiga forest, the only place in the world where brown bears, tigers and leopards co-exist. The fish owl lives exclusively along the rivers of Eastern Russia, Northeastern China, and Japan's Hokkaido Island, and can best be tracked in the winter snows, so very little is known about it. Now Russia's evolving fortunes, logging interests and climate change present new threats to the owl's survival. In this breath-taking nature and adventure story, Slaght recounts his experiences pursuing the owl through its forbidding territory, during months-long journeys covering thousands of miles, so that he and his fellow researchers can learn how to protect this endangered giant. Along the way he spends time with the Russians who inhabit the taiga and must survive in the harshest and most isolating of conditions. As much a portrait of the world's most extraordinary owl as of the Russian Far East itself, Owls of the Eastern Ice is a timely meditation on our relationship with the natural world and what it means to devote one's life to a single pursuit.
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Introduces us to the surprisingly complex world of the chicken, tracing the evolution of jungle fowl and the domestication of chickens by humans. This title describes the ways in which chickens experience the world, form families and friendships, communicate with each other, and ...play, bond and grieve.
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