Showing titles in Ecosystems & Habitats

Platypuses are mammals unlike any other on earth. They lay eggs, ooze milk through their skin, and can sense electricity. In this episode, we travel with a platypus as he moves through his nightly routine on the island of Tasmania. He uses electroreceptors to hunt underwater and does a synchronized swimming courtship ritual with his mate, who then digs a burrow 40 feet deep into the riverbank to nest.

‘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...

Part memoir, part homage to wilderness, Shearwater traces the author’s 50-year obsession with one of nature’s supreme travellers. In the finest tradition of nature writing, Roger Morgan-Grenville, author of Liquid Gold - described by Mary Colwell (Curlew Moon) as ‘a book that ignites joy and warmth’ - unpicks the science behind its incredible journey; and into the story of a year in the shearwater’s life, he threads the inspirational influence of his Hebridean grandmother who instilled in him a love of wild places and wild animals.

In 2020, writer and campaigner Guy Shrubsole moved from London to Devon. As he explored the wooded valleys, rivers and tors of Dartmoor, Guy discovered a spectacular habitat that he had never encountered before: temperate rainforest. Entranced, he would spend the coming months investigating the history, ecology and distribution of rainforests across England, Wales and Scotland. Britain, Guy discovered, was once a rainforest nation. This is the story of a unique habitat that has been so ravaged, most people today don’t realise it exists.

For centuries the Alps have seen the march of armies, the flow of pilgrims and Crusaders, the feats of mountaineers and the dreams of engineers - and some 14 million people live among their peaks today. In The Alps, Stephen O'Shea takes listeners up and down these majestic mountains, journeying through their 500-mile arc across France, Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Germany, Austria, and Slovenia.

Brown bears lead deeply cyclical lives. They need to gain sometimes hundreds of pounds during the warmer months to prepare for winter hibernation, a lifestyle that brings them into frequent contact with many other species’ cycles. In this episode, we meander through the Alaska peninsula with a bear and her cubs as she teaches them to hunt salmon at the falls, dig for clams along the coastal mudflats, and use the regional rubbing tree.

Lighthouses are striking totems of our relationship to the sea. For many, they encapsulate a romantic vision of solitary homes amongst the waves, but their original purpose is much more utilitarian than that. Still today we depend upon their guiding lights for the safe passage of ships. Nowhere is this truer than in the rock lighthouses of Great Britain and Ireland, a ring of 19 towers built between 1811-1905, so called because they were constructed on desolate rock formations in the middle of the sea, and made of granite to withstand the power of its waves.

The sun sinks over the Rio Grande, the mountains around it glow orange, and the world slows down. The Mexican free-tailed bats inside the Jornada Cave are just starting to stretch and murmur. In this episode, we visit the nursery where all the baby bats stay together, and we accompany a new mother as she journeys into the sky with the rest of her crew for a night of hunting bugs via echolocation.

My eyes lifted to the horizon and the unmistakable snowy outline of Everest. Everest, the mountain of my childhood dreams. A mountain that has haunted me my whole life. A mountain I have seen hundreds of times in photographs and films but never in real life. In April 2018, seasoned adventurer...

Published in 1951, The Sea Around Us is one of the most remarkably successful books ever written about the natural world. This classic work remains as fresh today as when it first appeared. Carson's writing teems with stunning, memorable images - the newly formed Earth cooling beneath an endlessly overcast sky, the centuries of nonstop rain that created the oceans, giant squids battling sperm whales hundreds of fathoms below the surface, and incredibly powerful tides moving 100 billion tons of water daily in the Bay of Fundy.

Ben Law has lived as a woodsman in Prickly Nut Wood for over 20 years. His authentic, incredible sense of the land and the wildlife, and his respect for age old traditions and how to sustain them offers a wonderful, inviting insight into the life and character of Prickly Nut Wood. Having...

The sea has captivated people ever since humans first set sail on it; its beauty, its force, the mysteries it holds. For the few who make their living from it, trying to understand it, to second guess its ever-changing moods, creates an addiction to salt water that keeps us coming back. My Fishing Life documents the reality of that life. This book lifts the lid on what it's like to be one of the country's very few female fishermen, and also do justice to an iconic industry that, while it feeds and impacts almost all of us, remains one of our most mysterious and misunderstood.

Bushcraft and survival legend Ray Mears takes us on his own lifetime's journey through the natural world, into the British countryside and across continents, and shows us how to tune our senses, enhance our experience of nature, and understand our place within it. Guiding us through practical fieldcraft tips, Ray brings us up close with creatures we share our planet with, and reveals how we can learn from them, from the stealth of the leopard to the patience and stillness of the crocodile, and even the colour-changing camouflage of the octopus.

Crows have long been the subject of folklore, likely because they’re strikingly similar to humans, leading lives rich in personality, intelligence, and relationships. In this episode, we fly the streets of Seattle with a crow as she grooms her mate, delivers what appears to be a gift, and finally commutes miles away from her territory to gather and chat with thousands of other crows before it’s time to roost for the night.

In Eager, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb reveals that our modern idea of what a healthy landscape looks like and how it functions is wrong, distorted by the fur trade that once trapped out millions of beavers from North America's lakes and rivers. The consequences of losing beavers were profound: streams eroded, wetlands dried up, and species from salmon to swans lost vital habitat. Today, a growing coalition of "Beaver Believers" recognizes that ecosystems with beavers are far healthier, for humans and non-humans alike, than those without them.

A hundred years. Thousands of women. One extraordinary pond. I have learned about peacocks and terrapins, giant cobras and booming widgeons; I have heard about celebrity spottings and al-fresco lovemaking and digestive biscuits. These things make up the history of the Ladies’ Pond, but they...

Reeling from the pain of devastating miscarriages and suffering from PTSD after military adventures in Afghanistan, Merlin and his wife Lizzie decide to leave the bustle of London and return to Merlin’s childhood home, a Cornish hill farm called Cabilla in the heart of Bodmin Moor. There, they are met by unexpected challenges: a farm slipping ever further into debt, the discovery that the overgrazed and damaged woods running throughout the valley are in fact one of the UK’s last remaining fragments of Atlantic temperate rainforest, and the sudden and near catastrophic strickening by Covid.

Offering innovative ideas for protecting coastlines and cleaning the toxic seas, Scales insists we need more ethical and sustainable fisheries and must prevent the other existential threat of deep-sea mining, which could significantly alter life on earth. Inspiring us all to maintain a sense of awe and wonder at the majesty beneath the waves, she urges us to fight for the better future that still exists for the Anthropocene ocean.

‘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...

In this joyous journey around the wild edges of Britain, Christopher Hart takes us through the life, ecology and history of the humble British hedge, showing us how this much-loved (but somewhat overlooked) feature is inextricably woven into our language, history and culture. Hedges – or hedgerows – have long been an integral part of the British landscape; a bastion of privacy for our gardens, a protective presence on winding country lanes and a vital hiding place for birds and beasts on farmland.