Staff Picks
Animal Behavior
- Morgan R.
- Tuesday, June 27, 2023
Collection
If you've ever wondered what elephant think, or how cats evolved, or how whales communicate, or how hundreds of birds know how to fly together without running into one another, check out one of these books!
What an Owl Knows
The New Science of the World's Most Enigmatic Birds
Published in 2023
"From the New York Times bestselling author of The Genius of Birds and The Bird Way, a brilliant scientific exploration of owls, the most elusive group of birds, and an investigation into why these remarkable and yet mysterious animals exert such a hold on human imagination For centuries, owls have captivated and intrigued us. Our fascination with these mysterious birds was first documented over 30,000 years ago, in the Chauvet cave paintings in southern France, and our enduring awareness and curiosity oftheir forward gaze and nearly silent flight has cemented the owl as a symbol of wisdom and knowledge, foresight and intuition. But what, really, does an owl know? Though our infatuation goes back centuries, scientists have only recently begun to study these birds in great detail. While more than 270 species exist today, and reside on every continent except Antarctica, owls are far more difficult to find and study than other birds - because while not only cryptic and perfectly camouflaged, owls are most active in the dark of night. Joining scientists on this maddening and elusive treasure hunt, Jennifer Ackerman brings alive the rich biological history of these animals and reveals the remarkable scientific discoveries into their brains and behavior. She explores how, with the modern technology and tools, researchers now know that owls talk all night long - without opening their bills. That that their hoots follow a series of complex rules, allowing them to express needs and desires. That owls duet. They migrate. They use tools. They hoard their prey. Some live in underground burrows, some dine on scorpions. Ackerman brings this research alive with her own personal field observations about owls, and dives deep too into why this bird endlessly inspires andbeguiles us. WHAT AN OWL KNOWS is an awe-inspiring and spellbinding journey across the globe and through human history, and a dazzling account of the astonishing health, hunting skills, communication, and sensory prowess that distinguishes the owl from nearly all other birds. An extraordinary glimpse into the mind of these brilliant animals, WHAT AN OWLS KNOWS pulls back the curtain on the the hidden and still undiscovered realities of our shared world"-- Provided by publisher.
A History of the World in 100 Animals
Published in 2022
"Award-winning author Simon Barnes selects the one hundred animals who have had the greatest impact on humanity and on whom humanity has had the greatest effect. He shows how we have domesticated animals for food and for transport, and how animals powered agriculture, making civilisation possible. In short, he charts the close relationship between humans and animals, finding examples from around the planet that bring the story of life on earth vividly to life, with great insight and understanding"-- Provided by publisher.
The Mind of a Bee
Published in 2022
A rich and surprising exploration of the intelligence of bees Most of us are aware of the hive mind--the power of bees as an amazing collective. But do we know how uniquely intelligent bees are as individuals? In The Mind of a Bee, Lars Chittka draws from decades of research, including his own pioneering work, to argue that bees have remarkable cognitive abilities. He shows that they are profoundly smart, have distinct personalities, can recognize flowers and human faces, exhibit basic emotions, count, use simple tools, solve problems, and learn by observing others. They may even possess consciousness.Taking readers deep into the sensory world of bees, Chittka illustrates how bee brains are unparalleled in the animal kingdom in terms of how much sophisticated material is packed into their tiny nervous systems. He looks at their innate behaviors and the ways their evolution as foragers may have contributed to their keen spatial memory. Chittka also examines the psychological differences between bees and the ethical dilemmas that arise in conservation and laboratory settings because bees feel and think. Throughout, he touches on the fascinating history behind the study of bee behavior.Exploring an insect whose sensory experiences rival those of humans, The Mind of a Bee reveals the singular abilities of some of the world's most incredible creatures.
Bitch
On the Female of the Species
Published in 2022
A leading zoologist takes a fierce and often humorous look at the females of the animal kingdom and subverts the prevailing opinion among evolutionary biologists who have insisted that males are more interesting.
The Truth About Animals
Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, and Other Tales from the Wild Side of Wildlife
Published in 2018
A tour of some of the basest instincts and vice-related mysteries of the animal world includes profiles of drunken moose, cheating penguins, lazy worker ants, and other oddities.
The Year of the Puppy
How Dogs Become Themselves
Published in 2022
"What is it like to be a puppy? Author of the classic Inside of a Dog, Alexandra Horowitz tries to find out, spending a year scrutinizing her puppy's daily existence, and poring over the science of early dog development. Few of us meet our dogs at Day One. The dog who will, eventually, become an integral part of our family, our constant companion and best friend, is born without us into a family of her own. A puppy's critical early development into the dog we come to know is usually missed entirely. Dog researcher Alexandra Horowitz aimed to change that with her family's new pup, Quiddity (Quid). In this scientific memoir she charts Quid's growth from wee grub to boisterous sprite, from her birth to her first birthday. Horowitz follows Quid's first weeks with her mother and ten roly-poly littermates, and then each week after the puppy joins her household of three humans, two large dogs, and a wary cat. She documents the social and cognitive milestones that so many of us miss in our puppies' lives, when caught up in the housetraining and behavioral training that easily overwhelms the first months of a dog's life with a new family. In focusing on training a dog to behave, we mostly miss the radical development of a puppy into themselves -through the equivalent of infancy, childhood, young adolescence, and teenagehood. By slowing down to observe Quid from week to week, The Year of the Puppy makes new sense of a dog's behavior in a way that is missed in a focus only on training. Horowitz keeps a lens on the puppy's point of view-how they (begin to) see and smell the world, make meaning of it, and become an individual personality. She's there when the puppies first open their eyes, first start to recognize each other and learn about cats, sheep, and people; she sees them from their first play bows to puberty. Horowitz also draws from the ample research in the fields of dog and human development to draw analogies between a dog's first year and the growing child -- and to note where they diverge. The Year of the Puppy is indispensable for anyone navigating their way through the frustrating, amusing, and ultimately delightful first year of a puppy's life"-- Provided by publisher
The Cat's Meow
How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa
Published in 2023
"The past, present, and future of the world's most popular and beloved pet, from a leading evolutionary biologist and great cat lover The domestic cat-your cat-has, from its evolutionary origins in Africa, been transformed in comparatively little time into one of the most successful and diverse species on the planet. Jonathan Losos, writing as both a scientist and a cat lover, explores how researchers today are unraveling the secrets of the cat, past and present, using all the tools of modern technology,from GPS tracking (you'd be amazed where those backyard cats roam) and genomics (what is your so-called Siamese cat . . . really?) to forensic archaeology. In addition to solving the mysteries of your cat's past, it gives us a cat's-eye view of today's habitats, including meeting wild cousins around the world whose habits your sweet house cat sometimes eerily parallels. Do lions and tigers meow? If not, why not? Why does my cat leave a dead mouse at my feet (or on my pillow)? Is a pet ocelot a bad idea? When and why did the cat make its real leap off the African plain? What's with all those cats in Egyptian hieroglyphics? In a genial voice, casually deciphering complex science and history with many examples from his own research and multi-cat household, Losos explores how selection, both natural and artificial, over the last several millennia has shaped the contemporary cat, with new breeds vastly different in anatomy and behavior from their ancestral stock. Yet the cat, ever a predator, still seems onlyone paw out of the wild, and readily reverts to its feral ways as it occupies new lands around the world. Humans are transforming cats, and they in turn are transforming the world around them. This charming and intelligent book suggests what the future may hold for both Felis catus and Homo sapiens"-- Provided by publisher.
Emperors of the Deep
Sharks--the Ocean's Most Mysterious, Most Misunderstood, and Most Important Guardians
Published in 2019
How to Speak Whale
A Voyage into the Future of Animal Communication
Published in 2022
"What if animals and humans could speak to one another? Tom Mustill-the nature documentarian who went viral when a thirty ton humpback whale breached onto his kayak-asks this question in his thrilling investigation into whale science and animal communication. "When a whale is in the water, it is like an iceberg: you only see a fraction of it and have no conception of its size." On September 12, 2015, Tom Mustill was paddling in a two-person kayak with a friend, just off the coast of California. It was cold, but idyllic-until a humpback whale breached, landing on top of them, releasing the energy equivalent of forty hand grenades. He was certain he was about to die, but both he and his friend survived miraculously unscathed. In the interviews that followed the incident, Mustill was left with one question: What could this astonishing encounter teach us? Drawing from his experience as a naturalist and wildlife filmmaker, Mustill started investigating human-whale interactions around the world. When he met two tech entrepreneurs, who told him they wanted to use artificial intelligence (AI) to decode animal communication, Mustill embarked on a journey where big data meets big beasts, using animal eavesdropping technologies to train AI-originally designed to translate human languages-to discover patterns in the conversations of animals. There is a revolution taking place in biology, as the technologies we've developed to explore our own languages are turned to nature. From seventeenth-century Dutch inventors, to the whaling industry of the nineteenth century, to the cutting edge of Silicon Valley, How to Speak Whale looks at how scientists and start-ups around the world are decoding animal languages. Whales, with their giant mammalian brains, offer one of the most realistic opportunities for this to happen. But what would the consequences of such human-animal interaction be? We're about to find out"-- Provided by publisher.
On Animals
Published in 2021
"A lifetime of musings, meditations, and in-depth profiles about animals"-- Provided by publisher.
Beaverland
How One Weird Rodent Made America
Published in 2022
"Traces the beaver's profound influence on our nation's history, culture and environment, from the early days of western expansion, as well as profiling a colorful group of people who have devoted their lives to the wonderfully weird rodent"-- Provided by publisher.
The Social Instinct
How Cooperation Shaped the World
Published in 2021
"In the tradition of Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene, Nichola Raihani's The Social Instinct is a profound and engaging look at the hidden relationships underpinning human evolution, and why cooperation is key to our future survival. Cooperation is the means by which life arose in the first place. It's how we progressed through scale and complexity, from free-floating strands of genetic material, to nation states. But given what we know about the mechanisms of evolution, cooperation is also something of a puzzle. How does cooperation begin, when on a Darwinian level, all that the genes in your body care about is being passed on to the next generation? Why do meerkat colonies care for one another's children? Why do babbler birds in the Kalahari form colonies in which only a single pair breeds? And how come some coral wrasse fish actually punish each other for harming fish from another species? A biologist by training, Raihani looks at where and how collaborative behavior emerges throughout the animal kingdom, and what problems it solves. She reveals that the species that exhibit cooperative behavior-teaching, helping, grooming, and self-sacrifice-most similar to our own tend not to be other apes; they are birds, insects, and fish, occupying far more distant branches of the evolutionary tree. By understanding the problems they face, and how they cooperate to solve them, we can glimpse how human cooperation first evolved. And we can also understand what it is about the way we cooperate that has made humans so distinctive-and so successful"-- Provided by publisher.
Fox & I
Published in 2021
A memoir about the friendship between a solitary woman and a fox, for readers of Wild and H Is for Hawk. Catherine Raven left home at fifteen, fleeing an abusive, disdainful father and an indifferent mother. More comfortable in nature than among people, she worked as a National Park ranger, eventually earning a PhD in biology. She built a house on an isolated plot of land in Montana, teaching remotely and leading field classes. One day, she realized that the mangy-looking fox who had been appearing on her property was now showing up every day at 4:15 p.m. She had never had a regular visitor before. How do you even talk to a fox? One day she brought out her camping chair, sat as close to him as she dared, and began reading to him from The Little Prince. Her scientific training had taught her not to anthropomorphize animals, but as she grew to know him, his personality revealed itself?and he became her friend. But friends cannot always save each other from the uncontained forces of nature. Fox and I is a poignant and dramatic tale of friendship, transformation, and coping with inevitable loss?and of how that loss can become meaning. It is also the introduction of an original, imaginative, stunning literary voice.
Fuzz
When Nature Breaks the Law
Published in 2021
"Join "America's funniest science writer" (Peter Carlson, Washington Post) Mary Roach on an irresistible investigation into the unpredictable world where wildlife and humans meet. What's to be done about a jaywalking moose? A grizzly bear caught breaking and entering? A murderous tree? As New York Times best-selling author Mary Roach discovers, the answers are best found not in jurisprudence but in science: the curious science of human-wildlife conflict, a discipline at the crossroads of human behavior and wildlife biology. Roach tags along with animal attack forensics investigators, human-elephant conflict specialists, bear managers, and "danger tree" faller-blasters. She travels from leopard-terrorized hamlets in the Indian Himalaya to St. Peter's Square in the early hours before the Pope arrives for Easter Mass, when vandal gulls swoop in to destroy the elaborate floral display. Along the way, Roach reveals as much about humanity as about nature's lawbreakers. Combining little- known forensic science and conservation genetics with a motley cast of laser scarecrows, langur impersonators, and mugging macaques, Fuzz offers hope for compassionate coexistence in our ever-expanding human habitat"-- Provided by publisher.
Becoming Wild
How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace
Published in 2020
"Some people insist that culture is strictly a human feat. What are they afraid of? This book looks into three cultures of other-than-human beings in some of Earth's remaining wild places. It shows how if you're a sperm whale, a scarlet macaw, or a chimpanzee, you too experience your life with the understanding that you are an individual in a particular community. You too are who you are not by genes alone; your culture is a second form of inheritance. You receive it from thousands of individuals, from pools of knowledge passing through generations like an eternal torch. You too may raise young, know beauty, or struggle to negotiate a peace. And your culture, too, changes and evolves. The light of knowledge needs adjusting as situations change, so a capacity for learning, especially social learning, allows behaviors to adjust, to change much faster than genes alone could adapt. Becoming Wild offers a glimpse into cultures among non-human animals through looks at the lives of individuals in different present-day animal societies. By showing how others teach and learn, Safina offers a fresh understanding of what is constantly going on beyond humanity. With reporting from deep in nature, alongside individual creatures in their free-living communities, this book offers a very privileged glimpse behind the curtain of Life on Earth, and helps inform the answer to that most urgent of questions: Who are we here with?"-- Provided by publisher.
Beyond Words
What Elephants and Whales Think and Feel
Published in 2019
"Follow researcher Carl Safina as he treks with a herd of elephants across the Kenyan landscape, then travel with him to the Pacific Northwest to track and monitor whales in their ocean home. Along the way, find out more about the interior lives of these giants of land and sea--how they play, how they fight, and how they communicate with one another, and sometimes with us, too. Weaving decades of field research with exciting new discoveries about the brain and featuring astonishing photographs taken by the author, Beyond Words: What Elephants and Whales Think and Feel gives readers an intimate and extraordinary look at what makes these animals different from us, but more important, what makes us all similar."--Jacket flap.
Many Things Under a Rock
The Mysteries of Octopuses
Published in 2023
"A behavioral ecologist's riveting account of his decades-long obsession with octopuses: his discoveries, adventures, and new scientific understanding of their behaviors. Of all the creatures of the deep blue, none is as captivating as the octopus. In Many Things Under a Rock, marine biologist David Scheel investigates four major mysteries about these elusive beings. How can we study an animal with perfect camouflage and secretive habitats? How does a soft and boneless creature defeat sharks and eels, while thriving as a predator of the most heavily armored animals in the sea? How do octopus bodies work? And how does a solitary animal form friendships, entice mates, and outwit rivals? Over the course of his twenty-five years studying octopuses, Scheel haswitnessed a sea change in what we know and are able to discover about octopus physiology and behavior-even an octopus's inner life. Here he explores amazing new scientific developments, weaving accounts of his own research, and surprising encounters, with stories and legends of Indigenous peoples that illuminate our relationship with these creatures across centuries. In doing so, he reveals a deep affinity between humans and even the most unusual and unique undersea dwellers. Octopuses are complex, emotional, and cognitive beings; even as Scheel unearths explanations for the key mysteries that have driven his work, he turns up many more things of wonder that lurk underneath. This is the story of what we have learned and what we are still learning about the natural history and wondrous lives of these animals with whom we share our blue planet"-- Provided by publisher.
An Immense World
How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
Published in 2022
"The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world. This book welcomes us into a previously unfathomable dimension--the world as it is truly perceived by other animals. We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires (and fireworks), songbirds that can see the Earth's magnetic fields, and brainless jellyfish that nonetheless have complex eyes. We discover that a crocodile's scaly face is as sensitive as a lover's fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, and that even fingernail-sized spiders can make out the craters of the moon. We meet people with unusual senses, from women who can make out extra colors to blind individuals who can navigate using reflected echoes like bats. Yong tells the stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, and also looks ahead at the many mysteries which lie unsolved"-- Provided by publisher.
Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test
How Behavior Evolves and Why It Matters
Published in 2022
"A lively exploration of animal behavior in all its glorious complexity, from tiny wasps to lumbering elephants-and humans. It's time to leave behind the tired nature-versus-nurture debate. In Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test, Marlene Zuk asks a more fascinating question: How does behavior evolve, and how is that process similar-and different-in people and animals? Drawing from a wealth of research, including her own on insects, she explores how genes and the environment work together to produce cockatoos that dance to rock music and ants that heal their injured companions. She follows the different paths cats and dogs took to living with humans, and asks whether bees are domestic animals. In exploring intelligence, mating behavior, and fighting disease, Zuk turns to smart spiders, silent crickets, and crafty crows. She shows how neither our behavior nor that of other animals is dictated solely by genes, and that animal behavior can be remarkably similar to human behavior and wonderfully complicated in its own right"-- Provided by publisher.