Showing titles in Ecosystems & Habitats

A Times and Sunday Times Book of the Year Peer into the secret, silent world of the freshwater fish and explore evolution of the art and industry of fishing in Britain's rivers and streams. From cunning Neolithic traps, intricate Roman nets and quarrellous Victorian societies to the evolution of...

WINNER OF THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR CONSERVATION 2025 A WATERSTONES AND GUARDIAN BEST BOOK OF 2024 'Both dynamite and medicine' AMY-JANE BEER 'Timely and rousing' THE TIMES ________________________________ The lie of the land: that Britain’s landowners care for the countryside. Our landowning...

A unique biography of a homeless man and a complete portrait of the hidden underclass. ‘So here it is, my attempt at the story of Stuart Shorter, thief, hostage taker, psycho and sociopath street raconteur, my spy on how the British chaotic underclass spend their troubled days at the beginning...

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.

*The Sunday Times Bestseller* ‘Extraordinary Insects is a joy’ The Times A Sunday Times Nature Book of the Year 2019 A journey into the weird, wonderful and truly astonishing lives of the small but mighty creatures who keep the world turning. Out of sight, underfoot, unseen beyond fleeting...

At 28,251 feet, K2 might be almost 800 feet shorter than Everest, but it’s a far harder climb. It will kill you on the way up and the way down. Mick Conefrey guides us through the early story of the legendary mountain and the extraordinary attempts that led up to its first ascent in 1954 - these are tales of riveting drama and unimaginable tragedy.

Though it remains by far the world's most famous mountain, in recent years, Everest's reputation has changed radically, with long queues of climbers on the Lhotse Face, lurid tales of frozen corpses and piles of high altitude trash. It wasn't always like this though. Once Everest was remote and inaccessible, a mysterious place, where only the bravest and most heroic dared to tread. The first attempt on Everest in 1922 by George Leigh Mallory and a British team is an extraordinary story full of controversy, drama and incident, populated by a set of larger-than-life characters.

Red pandas have thick bushy ringed tails like raccoons, but they aren’t related to panda bears or raccoons—in fact, they have no close relatives anywhere on Earth. In this episode, we wander the Himalayas with a red panda and her cubs as they munch on bamboo, practice walking in the treetops, and settle in to nap together as the first snowfall of the year covers their forest home.

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...

For fans of The Lost City of Z, Walking the Amazon, and Turn Right at Machu Picchu comes naturalist and explorer Paul Rosolie’s extraordinary adventure in the uncharted tributaries of the Western Amazon - a tale of discovery that vividly captures the awe, beauty, and isolation of this endangered land and presents an impassioned call to save it.

From the host of the Travel Channel’s “The Wild Within.” A hunt for the American buffalo—an adventurous, fascinating examination of an animal that has haunted the American imagination. In 2005, Steven Rinella won a lottery permit to hunt for a wild buffalo, or American bison, in the...

Birds, Beasts and Bedlam recounts the adventures of farmer-turned-rewilder Derek Gow, who is saving Britain’s much-loved but dangerously threatened species, from the water vole to beaver, wildcat to white stork, and tree frog to glow worm. Derek tells us all about the realities of rewilding: how he reared delicate roe deer and a sofa-loving wild boar piglet, moved a raging bison bull across the country, got bitten by a Scottish wildcat, returned honking skeins of graylag geese to the land and water that was once theirs, and restored the white stork to the Knepp Estate. 

At the southernmost tip of South Africa, where fresh and salt water collide, a tiny seahorse appears to levitate. Seahorses are the ocean’s slowest swimmers, but they have one of the world’s fastest muscle contractions, using it to suction up their prey. In this episode, we meander through eelgrass with a male Knysna seahorse as he twines tails with his partner, changes color to match the sand, and even gives birth to a brood of tiny seahorses.

From Susan Casey, bestselling author of The Devil’s Teeth, an astonishing book about colossal, ship-swallowing rogue waves and the surfers who seek them out. For centuries, mariners have spun tales of gargantuan waves, 100-feet high or taller. Until recently scientists dis­missed these...

Elephants are the largest land animals in the world. They are also intensely social and have advanced long-term memories. In this episode, a parade of Asian elephants makes its way through the Sri Lankan forest to a lake for drinks and mud baths, stopping periodically for group naps. The female leading the parade uses infrasonic rumbles—inaudible to humans, but traveling as far as two miles along the surface of the Earth as seismic waves—to invite friends and family around the forest to join her at the reservoir.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR ‘The bothy embrace is addictive’ ADAM NICOLSON 'Will have you reaching for your boots’ CAL FLYN …………………………………………………………….. A bothy is a remote hut in the wilderness that you...

Read by the author, Neil Shea 'Magnificent and moving. Shea writes with the magic of an aurora illuminating how life is rapidly changing across the cold expanses of the Arctic' - Steve Brusatte, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs 'Enchanting and fascinating...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Shinrin-Yoku by Dr Qing Li, read by Ramon Tikaram. Shinrin = Forest Yoku = Bathing Shinrin-Yoku or forest bathing is the practice of spending time in the forest for better health, happiness and a sense of calm. A pillar of Japanese culture for decades...

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.

The eagerly anticipated conclusion to Peter Godfrey-Smith’s three-part exploration of the origins of intelligence on Earth, which began with the bestselling Other Minds in 2018 and continued with Metazoa in 2020. The eagerly anticipated conclusion to Peter Godfrey-Smith’s three-part...