Showing titles in Outdoors & Nature

Brought to you by Penguin. People talk a lot about the problems with intensive farming. But the problem isn't the adjective. It's the noun. Around the world, farming has been wiping out vast habitats, depleting freshwater, polluting oceans, and accelerating global heating, while leaving millions...

‘There’s water in the engine,’ he said. ‘The engine has stopped.’ This changed everything… Surviving the Storms brings together incredible first-hand accounts of rescues carried out by the remarkable RNLI lifesavers. In this collection of heart-wrenching and life-affirming missions...

Animal scientists have long considered domestic livestock to be too dumb to know how to eat right, but the lifetime research of animal behaviorist Fred Provenza and his colleagues has debunked this myth. Their work shows that when given a choice of natural foods, livestock have an astoundingly refined palate, nibbling through the day on as many as fifty kinds of grasses, forbs, and shrubs to meet their nutritional needs with remarkable precision.

Ever since he was given a copy of Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World for his ninth birthday, Dom has been obsessed with the world of cryptozoology—monster hunting—and in Scary Monsters and Super Creeps, he heads to six completely different destinations to investigate local monster sightings. Are the monsters all the product of fevered minds, or is there a sliver of truth somewhere in the madness? Either way, the search gives Dom an excuse to dive into six fascinating destinations on a gloriously nutty adventure.

From blanket fairs to night kings, curfews to crime, At Day's Close is an intriguing and captivating investigation into the night. Until now, this rich and complex universe in which we spend nearly half of our lives was a world long-lost to historians. Here, Ekirch explores how the night was lived in the past, through travel accounts, memoirs, letters, folklore, poems, court records and coroner's reports. More than this, it is a passionate argument in the case for less artificial light in an increasingly bright world.

‘Windswept is a wonderful work, prose painted in bold, bright strokes like a Scottish Colourist's canvas’ ROBERT MACFARLANE ‘An instant classic of British nature-writing’ SUNDAY TELEGRAPH A few years ago, Annie Worsley traded a busy life in academia to take on a small-holding or croft on...

'A heartwarming story about family, forgiveness and the importance of kindness' FIONA HARPER on The Kindness Club on Mapleberry Lane 'Comforting and uplifting, this book is a joy to read' MY WEEKLY 'A heartwarming tale' WOMAN'S OWN Home is where the heart is... Joy has made a family for herself...

Conservationist Rachel Carson spent over six years documenting the effects on DDT, a synthetic organic compound used as an insecticide, on numerous communities. Her analysis revealed that such powerful, persistent chemical pesticides have been used without a full understanding of the extent of their potential harm to the whole biota, including the damage they've caused to wildlife, birds, bees, agricultural animals, domestic pets, and even humans. An instant best seller that was read by President Kennedy during the summer of 1962, this classic remains one of the best introductions to the complicated and controversial subject.

We live in an age of mass extinction. The earth's biodiversity is decreasing at a faster rate than ever. Industrial agriculture and the standardisation of taste are not only wiping out many edible plants but also the food cultures, histories and livelihoods that go with them. Inspired by a global project to collect and preserve foods that are at risk of extinction, Dan Saladino sets out to encounter these endangered foods.

Fennec foxes’ ears can be up to half as long as their bodies. They use them to track movement across the Sahara Desert, including under the sand. In this episode, we follow a fox as he meanders home to his family through the sand dunes as they slowly shift with the wind.

Why Animals Talk is an exhilarating journey through the untamed world of animal communication. Drawing on the author's extensive research and observations of animals in the wild, the book shatters conventional wisdom and invites you to experience communication through the eyes of animals themselves. From the majestic howls of wolves and the enchanting chatter of parrots to the melodic clicks of dolphins and the spirited grunts of chimpanzees, these diverse and seemingly bizarre expressions are far from mere noise. In fact, they hold secrets that we are just beginning to decipher.

Elena Godwin could never have known that her dream holiday to Mexico would change her life forever. She thought that she was in charge of her own destiny. But on a gorgeous summer evening, her whole world is ripped from her feet in a single moment. Ten years later, she still can't forget the face of the stranger who held her whilst everything she knew was destroyed. Thrown back together again, Elena starts to uncover the truth around that fateful night—and questions whether she made the right decision all those years ago.

Combining rich historical detail and a harrowing, pulse-pounding narrative, Close to Shore brilliantly re-creates the summer of 1916, when a rogue Great White shark attacked swimmers along the New Jersey shore, triggering mass hysteria and launching the most extensive shark hunt in history. In...

The nation's greatest voice, David Attenborough, reads J. A. Baker's extraordinary classic of British nature writing, The Peregrine. J. A. Baker's classic of British nature writing was first published in 1967. Greeted with acclaim, it went on to win the Duff Cooper Prize, the pre-eminent literary prize of the time. Luminaries such as Ted Hughes, Barry Lopez and Andrew Motion have cited it as one of the most important books in 20th-century nature writing.

An accessible and compelling story of a scientist's discovery of plant communication and how it influenced her research and changed her life. In this "phytobiography"--a collection of stories written in partnership with a plant--research scientist Monica Gagliano reveals the dynamic role plants...

Alone in the wilderness Shortlisted for the General Nonfiction Award at the 2026 Ockham Book Awards 2026 Book Industry Awards NZ Audiobook of the Year Finalist Award-winning journalist Naomi Arnold spends nearly nine months walking the length of New Zealand on Te Araroa, fulfilling a 20-year...

Super Volcanoes revels in the incomparable power of volcanic eruptions past and present, Earth-bound and otherwise, and explores how these eruptions reveal secrets about the worlds to which they belong. Science journalist and volcanologist Robin George Andrews describes the stunning ways in which volcanoes can sculpt the sea, land, and sky, and even influence the machinery that makes or breaks the existence of life. 

In Wilderlands, archaeologist Eloise Kane unearths 12,000 years of our changing relationship with and influence on the landscape. Through prehistory, Roman occupation, the Middle Ages and beyond, we see the unfamiliar beasts of our old wild make way for species such as brown hare and fallow deer, now romanticised as eternal symbols of the British countryside, but introduced much later than we might think. Places free from our influence haven't existed for a very long time. But Eloise Kane invites us to rethink our definition of the wild - not as separate from us.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author and host of Netflix’s MeatEater comes “a unique and valuable alternate view of where our food comes from” (Anthony Bourdain). “Revelatory . . . With every chapter, you get a history lesson, a hunting lesson, a nature lesson, and a cooking...

First heard every weekday morning at 5.58am on BBC Radio 4, Tweet of the Day captured the imagination of early risers and bird lovers, proving so popular that it was named Radio Programme of the Year 2014. Each episode begins with a bird call or song, followed by fascinating ornithological detail about its owner. This collection contains every edition from the first series, British Birds.