Best of Natural History

Top 10 Best of Natural History : The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, The Flight of the Iguana: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature, Silent Spring, Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death, and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators, The Snow Leopard, Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds, A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, The Galápagos: A Natural History

The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions
AuthorDavid Quammen
ISBN0684827123
David Quammen's book, The Song of the Dodo, is a brilliant, stirring work, breathtaking in its scope, far-reaching in its message -- a crucial book in precarious times, which radically alters the way in which we understand the natural world and our place in that world. It's also a book full of entertainment...
AuthorAldo Leopold
ISBN0195007778
First published in 1949, A Sand County Almanac combines some of the finest nature writing since Thoreau with an outspoken and highly ethical regard for America's relationship to the land.

Written with an unparalleled understanding of the ways of nature, the book includes a section on the...
AuthorDavid Quammen
ISBN0684836262
From the award-winning author of The Song of the Dodo comes a collection of essays in which various weird and wonderful aspects of nature are examined. From tales of vegetarian piranha fish and voiceless dogs to the scientific search for the genes that threaten to destroy the cheetah, Quammen captures...
Silent Spring
AuthorRachel Carson
ISBN0618249060
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was first published in three serialized excerpts in the New Yorker in June of 1962. The book appeared in September of that year and the outcry that followed its publication forced the banning of DDT and spurred revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land,...
AuthorWilliam Stolzenburg
ISBN1596912995
A provocative look at how the disappearance of the world's great predators has upset the delicate balance of the environment, and what their disappearance portends for the future, by an acclaimed science journalist.

It wasn't so long ago that wolves and great cats, monstrous fish and flying...
The Snow Leopard
AuthorPeter Matthiessen
ISBN0140255087
“The sun is roaring, it fills to bursting each crystal of snow. I flush with feeling, moved beyond my comprehension, and once again, the warm tears freeze upon my face. These rocks and mountains, all this matter, the snow itself, the air- the earth is ringing. All is moving, full of power, full of light.”...
AuthorScott Weidensaul
ISBN0865475911
Bird migration is the world's only true unifying natural phenomenon, stitching the continents together in a way that even the great weather systems fail to do. Scott Weidensaul follows awesome kettles of hawks over the Mexican coastal plains, bar-tailed godwits that hitchhike on gale winds 7,000...
A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons
AuthorRobert M. Sapolsky
ISBN0743202414
In the tradition of Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, Robert Sapolsky, a foremost science writer and recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant, tells the mesmerizing story of his twenty-one years in remote Kenya with a troop of Savannah baboons.

“I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when...
The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World
AuthorStephen Brusatte
ISBN0062490451
Brusatte traces the evolution of dinosaurs from their inauspicious start as small shadow dwellers—themselves the beneficiaries of a mass extinction caused by volcanic eruptions at the beginning of the Triassic period—into the dominant array of species every wide-eyed child memorizes today,...
The Galápagos: A Natural History
AuthorHenry Nicholls
ISBN0465035973
Charles Darwin called it "a little world within itself." Sailors referred to it as "Las Encantadas"- the enchanted islands. Lying in the eastern Pacific Ocean, straddling the equator off the west coast of South America, the Galápagos is the most pristine archipelago to be found anywhere in the tropics....
AuthorPaul S. Martin
ISBN0520231414
As recently as 11,000 years ago—"near time" to geologists—mammoths, mastodons, gomphotheres, ground sloths, giant armadillos, native camels and horses, the dire wolf, and many other large mammals roamed North America. In what has become one of science's greatest riddles, these large animals...
Wolves in the Land of Salmon
AuthorDavid Moskowitz
ISBN1604692278
Long considered an icon of the wild, wolves capture our imagination and spark controversy. Humans are the adult wolf’s only true natural predator; its return to the old-growth forests and wild coastlines of the Pacific Northwest renews age-old questions about the value of wildlands and wildlife.
...
AuthorTim Flannery
ISBN0802138888
In The Eternal Frontier, world-renowned scientist and historian Tim Flannery tells the unforgettable story of the geological and biological evolution of the North American continent, from the time of the asteroid strike that ended the age of dinosaurs 65 million years ago, to the present day. Flannery...
AuthorRobin Wall Kimmerer
ISBN0870714996
Living at the limits of our ordinary perception, mosses are a common but largely unnoticed element of the natural world. Gathering Moss is a beautifully written mix of science and personal reflection that invites readers to explore and learn from the elegantly simple lives of mosses.Robin Wall Kimmerer's...
AuthorColin Tudge
ISBN1400050367
There are redwoods in California that were ancient by the time Columbus first landed, and pines still alive that germinated around the time humans invented writing. There are Douglas firs as tall as skyscrapers, and a banyan tree in Calcutta as big as a football field.

From the tallest to the...
AuthorDouglas Preston
ISBN0312104561
Now this was satisfying from nearly beginning to end. It's a look at New York City's natural history museum, split into two parts. The first is a more straightforward history of the institution, both how it came about as well as how the philosophy of managing an enormous natural history collection developed...
AuthorJohn Muir
ISBN1883011248
In a lifetime of exploration, writing, and passionate political activism, John Muir became America’s most eloquent spokesman for the mystery and majesty of the wilderness. A crucial figure in the creation of our national parks system and a far-seeing prophet of environmental awareness who founded...
Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History
AuthorStephen Jay Gould
ISBN0393308189
More than any other modern scientists, Stephen Jay Gould has opened up to millions the wonders of evolutionary biology. His genius as an essayist lies in his unmatched ability to use his knowledge of the world, including popular culture, to illuminate the realm of science.

Ever Since Darwin,...
AuthorJon R. Luoma
Luoma writes about what “long-term, large-scale, interdisciplinary ecological studies” can tell us about forests. He focuses on the teams that have worked at the Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon. Fascinating information on how nutrients are extracted and cycle through the plants, fungi,...
AuthorJohn Muir
John Muir’s ebullient spirit and love of nature infuse these accounts of visiting Yosemite Valley, Kings Canyon, sequoia groves, and Mount Whitney. Blending keen observations of flora, geography, and geology, the natural forces that shape the landscape, and the changing seasons, Muir paints...
AuthorDavid George Haskell
A biologist reveals the secret world hidden in a single square meter of forest.

In this wholly original book, biologist David Haskell uses a one-square-meter patch of old-growth Tennessee forest as a window onto the entire natural world. Visiting it almost daily for one year to trace nature’s...
Tigers in the Snow
AuthorPeter Matthiessen
ISBN0865475962
No more than a few thousand tigers survive in pockets of Asia, a continent they once roamed far and wide. The largest of them, the Siberian tiger, is today almost entirely confined to the little-populated Russian Far East, a region that may offer the species' best hope for survival. But the implosion...
AuthorSharon Levy
ISBN0195370120
Until about 13,000 years ago, North America was home to a menagerie of massive mammals. Mammoths, camels, and lions walked the ground that has become Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles and foraged on the marsh land now buried beneath Chicago's streets. Then, just as the first humans reached the Americas,...
AuthorDavid Rothenberg
ISBN1250005213
In the spring of 2013 the cicadas in the Northeastern United States will yet again emerge from their seventeen-year cycle—the longest gestation period of any animal. Those who experience this great sonic invasion compare their sense of wonder to the arrival of a comet or a solar eclipse. This unending...
AuthorMiriam Darlington
ISBN1847084850
Over the course of a year, Miriam Darlington travelled around Britain in search of wild otters: from her home in Devon to the wilds of Scotland; to Cumbria, Wales, Northumberland, Cornwall, Somerset and the River Lea; to her childhood home near the Ouse, the source of her watery obsession.


Otter...
AuthorEric Dinerstein
ISBN1610911954
When you look out your window, why are you so much more likely to see a robin or a sparrow than a Kirtland's warbler or a California condor? Why are some animals naturally rare and others so abundant? The quest to find and study seldom-seen jaguars and flamboyant Andean cocks-of-the-rock is as alluring...
AuthorLisa-Ann Gershwin
Our oceans are becoming increasingly inhospitable to life—growing toxicity and rising temperatures coupled with overfishing have led many marine species to the brink of collapse. And yet there is one creature that is thriving in this seasick environment: the beautiful, dangerous, and now incredibly...
Thousand Mile Song: Whale Music in a Sea of Sound
AuthorDavid Rothenberg
ISBN0465071287
Whale song is an astonishing world of sound whose existence no one suspected before the 1960s. Its discovery has forced us to confront the possibility of alien intelligence-not in outer space but right here on earth. Thoughtful, richly detailed, and deeply entertaining, Thousand Mile Song uses the...
The Running Hare: The Secret Life of Farmland
AuthorJohn Lewis-Stempel
ISBN0857523260
From the Winner of the Thwaites Wainwright Prize 2015

Traditional ploughland is disappearing. Seven cornfield flowers have become extinct in the last twenty years. Once abundant, the corn bunting and the lapwing are on the Red List. The corncrake is all but extinct in England. And the hare...
AuthorJames Prosek
ISBN0060566116
Tour through the life history and cultural associations of the freshwater eel, exploring its biology in streams and epic migrations in the ocean, its myth and lore, its mystery and beauty. Prosek travels the globe to tell the story of the eel--from New York to New Zealand; from Europe to Japan and the...
Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live
AuthorRob Dunn
ISBN1541645766
A natural history of the wilderness in our homes, from the microbes in our showers to the crickets in our basements

Even when the floors are sparkling clean and the house seems silent, our domestic domain is wild beyond imagination. In Never Home Alone, biologist Rob Dunn introduces us to the...
AuthorTim Birkhead
ISBN0802779662
Most people would love to be able to fly like a bird, but few of us are aware of the other sensations that make being a bird a gloriously unique experience. What is going on inside the head of a nightingale as it sings, and how does its brain improvise? How do desert birds detect rain hundreds of kilometers...
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