Showing titles in Ecosystems & Habitats

Ice is far more than frozen water—it is a force that shapes planets, preserves history, and hides some of nature’s strangest secrets. Hidden World of Ice takes you on a fascinating journey through the frozen corners of our world, uncovering the science, history, and bizarre wonders locked inside ice. From ancient glaciers that store Earth’s climate memory to the strange physics that makes ice behave unlike any other solid, this book reveals why frozen water is one of nature’s greatest mysteries.

** THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER ** 'Gripping... the wildlife is so fantastical that the images on the page feel like works of the imagination.' Evening Standard 'THIS IS THE STORY OF OUR OCEAN AND WE MUST WRITE ITS NEXT CHAPTER TOGETHER. FOR IF WE SAVE THE SEA, WE SAVE OUR WORLD. AFTER A...

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the book’s first publication, David Attenborough has revisited Life on Earth, completely updating and adding to the original text, taking account of modern scientific discoveries from around the globe....

The Sunday Times Bestseller A new, fully updated narrative edition of David Attenborough’s seminal biography of our world, The Living Planet. Nowhere on our planet is devoid of life. Plants and animals thrive or survive within every extreme of climate and habitat that it offers. Single species...

Random House presents the audiobook edition of The Wood by John Lewis-Stempel, read by Leighton Pugh. From 'one of the best nature-writers of his generation' (Country Life) and 2017 winner of the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing, this BBC Radio 4 'Book of the Week' is the story of a wood -...

Chosen by WATERSTONES as one of their BEST NATURE WRITING BOOKS of 2024 Can you tell a tomato from a grape? Lawn from an oak tree? Then congratulations - you are a botanist. Self-confessed bad birdwatcher Simon Barnes thought he knew nothing about plants. He didn't object to them: trees are...

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...

WINNER OF THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR CONSERVATION 2023 The Sunday Times Science Book of the Year As seen on Countryfile ‘If anyone was born to save Britain’s rainforests, it was Guy Shrubsole’ Sunday Times Shortlisted for the Richard Jefferies Society Literary Prize Temperate rainforest may...

Steve Backshall was nine years old the first time he saw a shark, while on holiday with his family in Malaysia. It was the beginning of a life-long fascination with these 'lords of the sea', and the oceanic life around them. His career as one of the world's most popular naturalists and explorers has taken him to countless underwater places, many never before seen by others. And he's also been witness to the startling decline in fortune of our oceans' wild inhabitants over the past fifty years. Deep Blue takes us on an unforgettable tour of the many worlds of aquatic life.

A groundbreaking study that radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans in 1492. Traditionally, Americans learned in school that the ancestors of the people who inhabited the Western Hemisphere at the time of Columbus’s landing had crossed the Bering...

Brought to you by Penguin. From the winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award comes an epic walk across the Alps in the footsteps of a wolf, throwing unique light on Europe's mountainous hinterlands at a moment of political and environmental change. In 2011, a young wolf named...

'The tree is the hero in his book.' The Times 'A thrilling journey of discovery' -- Tristan Gooley, author of How to Read a Tree 'Levison Wood has done the impossible. To tell the story of trees in a single book is a Herculean task, but one that he has resoundingly achieved.' -- Merlin...

Bloomsbury presents A Mudlarking Year written and read by Lara Maiklem. FROM THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF MUDLARKING 'An absolute treasure trove of sound advice and historical detail' Katherine May 'A delightful and a profound meditation on the variety of human experience' Ian Mortimer...

'Exhilaratingly whizzes through billions of years . . . Gee is a marvellously engaging writer, juggling humour, precision, polemic and poetry to enrich his impossibly telescoped account . . . [making] clear sense out of very complex narratives' - The Times 'Henry Gee makes the kaleidoscopically...

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.

One of the inspirations for the major motion picture Everest, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Keira Knightley. This is the true story of a 24-hour period on Everest when members of three separate expeditions were caught in a storm and faced a battle against hurricane-force winds, exposure, and the effects of altitude, which ended the worst single-season death toll in the peak's history.

Brought to you by Penguin. **LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2026* The Genius of Trees tells the mind-expanding global story of the inventive and astonishing ways trees learned to shape our natural world. Over hundreds of millions of years, from prehistoric forests to the trees...

Brought to you by Penguin. A dazzlingly original, lyrical and epic encounter with the Earth as it used to be What would it be like to visit the ancient landscapes of the past? To experience the Jurassic or Cambrian worlds, to wander among these other lands, as creatures extinct for millions of...

Brought to you by Penguin. From celebrated writer Robert Macfarlane comes this brilliant, perspective-shifting new book – which answers a resounding yes to the question of its title. At its heart is a single, transformative idea: that rivers are not mere matter for human use, but living beings...

Brought to you by Penguin. Roger Deakin set out in 1996 to swim through the British Isles. The result a uniquely personal view of an island race and a people with a deep affinity for water. From the sea, from rock pools, from rivers and streams, tarns, lakes, lochs, ponds, lidos, swimming pools...

Kids love the ocean - it’s mysterious and unknown, home to monsters of the imagination and some of the most fascinating life forms on the planet. But while many grown-ups might love being by or on the sea, how much do we actually know about the world beneath the waves? In this follow-up to A Grown-Up Guide to Dinosaurs, evolutionary biologist, Professor Ben Garrod, takes the listener on an oceanic journey from the beginning of life on Earth to the present day, discovering what the ocean actually is and why it’s so important in the evolutionary history of life.

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.

On New Year’s Day 2012, Amy-Jane Beer’s beloved friend Kate set out with a group of others to kayak the River Rawthey in Cumbria. Kate never came home, and her death left her devoted family and friends bereft and unmoored. Returning to visit the Rawthey years later, Amy realises how much she misses the connection to the natural world she always felt when on or close to rivers, and so begins a new phase of exploration.

By 1930, no place in the world was less well explored than Greenland. The native Inuit had occupied the relatively accessible west coast for centuries. The east coast, however, was another story. In August 1930, Henry George Watkins (nicknamed “Gino”), a twenty-three-year-old British explorer, led thirteen scientists and explorers on an ambitious expedition to the east coast of Greenland and into its vast and forbidding interior to set up a permanent meteorological base on the icecap, 8,200 feet above sea level.

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...

North Ronaldsay sheep have been roaming the shores of a Scottish isle for centuries. They outnumber people there by more than twenty to one. While most sheep graze in fields, the North Ronaldsay are a breed apart: they forage seaweed on the rocky beach. In this episode, we follow a lamb as she crosses the island’s ancient stone dyke and sees the ocean for the first time.

In Wilding, Isabella Tree tells the story of the ‘Knepp experiment’, a pioneering rewilding project in West Sussex, using free roaming grazing animals to create new habitats for wildlife. Part gripping memoir, part fascinating account of the ecology of our countryside, Wilding is, above all...

California’s coast redwoods are Earth's tallest living beings, some reaching more than 350 feet high. They can also live for more than 2,000 years, outlasting entire civilizations. In this episode, we spend an evening with an ancient tree. Below ground, its roots tap into a forest-wide network; above ground, its branches harbor life in its many forms.

Lara Maiklem has scoured the banks of the Thames for over 15 years, in pursuit of the objects that the river unearths: from Neolithic flints to Roman hair pins, medieval buckles to Tudor buttons, Georgian clay pipes to Victorian toys. These objects tell her about London and its lost ways of life. Moving from the river's tidal origins in the west of the city to the point where it meets the sea in the east, Mudlarking is a search for urban solitude and history on the River Thames, what Lara calls 'the longest archaeological site in the world'.

Sloths are the slowest mammals on earth. They can hardly see. They live in rainforests among jaguars, pumas, and countless other predators. Yet they survive. And they do it by being so incredibly slow, and living a life covered in algae. In this episode, we hang with a sloth in the jungle of Costa Rica as he spends a month digesting one single leaf, and we see the symbiosis and collaboration that surrounds him.

From prehistory to the modern era, our coastline has shaped Britain, not only physically but socially, economically and culturally. Far from being at the margins of national interests, the coast has been at the heart of the British people's most important endeavours and central to era-defining national events. From artifacts lost by hunter-gatherers in a land beneath the sea to bustling medieval ports, smugglers' caves, early seaside resorts, fortifications and secret bases, the coast is resplendent with fascinating history to explore and enjoy.