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Whether we live in cities, in the suburbs, or in the country, birds are ubiquitous features of daily life, so much so that we often take them for granted. But even the casual observer is aware that birds don’t fill our skies in the number they once did. That awareness has spawned conservation action that has led to notable successes, including the recovery of some of the nation’s most emblematic species, such as the Bald Eagle, Brown Pelican, Whooping Crane, and Peregrine Falcon. Despite this, a third of all American bird species are in trouble—in many cases, they’re in imminent danger of extinction. The most authoritative account ever published of the threats these species face, The American Bird Conservancy Guide to Bird Conservation will be the definitive book on the subject.

The Guide presents for the first time anywhere a classification system and threat analysis for bird habitats in the United States, the most thorough and scientifically credible assessment of threats to birds published to date, as well as a new list of birds of conservation concern. Filled with beautiful color illustrations and original range maps, the Guide is a timely, important, and inspiring reference for birders and anyone else interested in conserving North America’s avian fauna. But this book is far more than another shout of crisis. The Guide also lays out a concrete and achievable plan of long-term action to safeguard our country’s rich bird life. Ultimately, it is an argument for hope. Whether you spend your early weekend mornings crouched in silence with binoculars in hand, hoping to check another species off your list, or you’ve never given much thought to bird conservation, you’ll appreciate the visual power and intellectual scope of these pages.

Including more than four hundred species from all seven recognized biological families, a beautiful visual celebration of bee species the world over. 

The honeycombs, hives, dancing, and royalty of bee colonies have long captured the public’s imagination, but there’s far more to these insects. There are over 20,000 bee species, but only a handful have colonies approaching the organization of the familiar western honeybee. The typical bee, if there is one, is solitary. It nests in the ground or a stem and has seven to fifteen offspring that develop and emerge the following year, long after their mother has died. These solitary species vary tremendously in the flowers they visit, how they collect pollen and nectar, the architecture of their nests, and how males strategize to find mates. Furthermore, another 17% of all bee species are well-armored parasites, often with striking colors and an array of tactics for attacking other bees.

Bees’ keystone contribution, as pollinators, to the human food supply and to the proper function of ecosystems far exceeds their numbers. From the emerald-green dilemma orchid bee to the spined leafcutter cuckoo, The Book of Bees celebrates bee species worldwide, highlighting a broad range of their diversity to illustrate how different they are in behavior, life history, and interactions with flowers and humans. Each entry includes a distribution map, a table of essential information, a section on related species, and a description of the species’ importance in terms of taxonomy, rarity, behavior, and scientific significance. Striking photos show the bees at their actual size and are also enlarged to showcase intricate details.

This wide-ranging exploration of social, solitary, and parasitic bees offers fascinating insights into their remarkable lives, fostering greater appreciation of their ecological importance and the need for their conservation.

An up-to-date, exquisitely illustrated guide to six hundred of the world’s beguiling beetles.

When renowned British geneticist J. B. S. Haldane was asked what could be inferred about God from a study of his works, Haldane replied, “An inordinate fondness for beetles.” With more than 440,000 known species, and scientific estimates that millions more have yet to be identified, their abundance is indisputable, as is their variety. They range from the delightful summer firefly to the one-hundred-gram Goliath beetle. Beetles offer a dazzling array of shapes, sizes, and colors that entice scientists and collectors across the globe.

In a new updated edition, The Book of Beetles celebrates the beauty and diversity of this marvelous group of insects. The book includes six hundred significant beetle species, and each entry features a distribution map, basic biology, feeding habits, and information on cultural and economic significance. The beetles appear both at their actual size and enlarged to show details, such as the sextet of spots that distinguish the six-spotted tiger beetle or the jagged ridges of the mandibles on the giant jawed sawyer beetle. With updates to the common names, distribution, classification, or photographs for nearly five hundred entries, this edition offers the latest science and accessibly written, descriptive text that will appeal to researchers and armchair coleopterists alike.

The humble beetle continues to grow in popularity, taking center stage in biodiversity studies, sustainable agriculture programs, and even the dining rooms of adventurous and eco-conscious chefs. The Book of Beetles is the authoritative reference on these remarkably adaptable and beautiful creatures.

For all dog lovers, a stunningly illustrated and scientifically informed global guide to our beloved canine companions and their wild kin.

Dogs are spectacularly diverse. From the world’s smallest wild canid, the diminutive fennec fox, to the majestic grey wolf, and from the towering great Dane to the tiny Chihuahua, The Book of Dogs celebrates the connections between humans’ best friends, their ancestors, and their wild cousins, offering insights into both wild and domestic canines and profiling every related species in the dog family Canidae as well as the vast variety of domestic dog breeds.

No other book so comprehensively and globally covers the most widespread family of carnivore species, helping to show that humans’ companions are part of a much larger animal world. Leading canid expert and award-winning author David W. Macdonald accessibly explains developments in the study of genetics to reveal the ancestry of modern canids and the astonishing hybridization among them. In addition to showcasing the diversity of our planet’s dogs, the book presents the latest research on the ecology, behavior, and society of wild dog species. These compelling descriptions with beautiful photographs—including life-size snout images of each of the thirty-seven wild canid species and over two hundred global breeds—offer readers of The Book of Dogs a chance to meet and understand our companions and their kin like never before.

From 1974 to the present, the Institute of Classical Archaeology at the University of Texas at Austin has carried out archaeological excavations in the ancient territory (chora) of Metaponto, now located in the modern province of Basilicata on the southern coast of Italy. This wide-ranging investigation, which covers a number of sites and a time period ranging from prehistory to the Roman Empire, has unearthed a wealth of new information about the ancient rural economy in southern Italy. These discoveries will be published in a multi-volume series titled The Chora of Metaponto. This volume on archaeozoology—the study of animal remains from archaeological sites—is the second in the series, following The Chora of Metaponto: The Necropoleis (1998).

Archaeozoology at Pantanello and Five Other Sites describes the animal remains found throughout Metaponto and discusses what they reveal about ancient practices of hunting and herding, domestication and importation of new breeds, people's attitudes toward animals, and what animal remains indicate about past environments. A chapter devoted to bird bones, which are a relatively rare find because of their fragility, provides high quality information on the environment and methods of fowling, as well as on the beliefs and symbolism associated with birds. The final chapter covers tools—some simple, others sophisticated and richly decorated—made from animal bones.

A principal coloration scientist offers a comprehensive and beautifully illustrated synthesis of coloration in mammals, weaving together contemporary research on evolution, underlying genetics, visual systems, and relevance to humans. 

Why are giant pandas black and white, mandrills red and blue, but mice brown? How do mammalian colors and patterns develop? And why do we see in three colors, but deer do not? A cadre of evolutionary scientists, including geneticists, behavioral ecologists, visual ecologists, and anthropologists has worked for over a century to answer these and other questions about the origin and functions of mammal coloration in nature. One of them is celebrated biologist Tim Caro, who has studied animal coloration for over three decades. In this landmark book, he presents a synthesis of experimental and observational studies to explain how and why animal coloration has evolved for three primary reasons: protection against predators, communication, and to respond to environmental factors. Furthermore, Caro provides accessible descriptions of the various genetic and visual mechanisms that have shaped mammals’ extraordinarily diverse colors and patterns. 

Victorian naturalists were the first to recognize that coloration influences individuals’ survival and reproduction, and this led to an explosion of research on its adaptive significance a century later. Then, at the beginning of the twentieth century, biologists began to work on the genomic and developmental basis of coloration. Since then, genetic studies on model organisms, particularly mice, have led to a deep understanding of the genes regulating the production of melanin pigments and lately, pattern formation. Simultaneously, scientists have studied organisms’ color perception. However, these functional, molecular, and mechanistic approaches rarely overlap, as they historically emanate from different areas of science. In this book, Caro ties these areas of research together for the first time. Caro outlines perception and production of color; teases apart different aspects of protective coloration; discusses social and sexual signaling; explores environmental drivers of coloration in nonhuman mammals, including domesticated species; and discusses human biology and our use of color in clothing. The resulting volume offers readers both a holistic view of today’s science and an honest assessment of the remaining questions for future research.

This is the story of the survival, recovery, astonishing success, and controversial status of the double-crested cormorant. After surviving near extinction driven by DDT and other contaminants from the 1940s through the early 1970s, the cormorant has made an unprecedented comeback from mere dozens to a population in the millions, bringing the bird again into direct conflict with humans. Hated for its colonial nesting behavior; the changes it brings to landscapes;  and especially its competition with commercial and sports fishers, fisheries, and fish farmers throughout the Great Lakes and Mississippi Delta regions, the cormorant continues to be persecuted  by various means, including the shotgun.

In The Double-Crested Cormorant, Dennis Wild brings together the biological, social, legal, and international aspects of the cormorant's world to give a complete and balanced view of one of the Great Lakes' and perhaps North America's most misunderstood species. In addition to taking a detailed look at the complex natural history of the cormorant, the book explores the implications of congressional acts and international treaties, the workings and philosophies of state and federal wildlife agencies, the unrelenting efforts of aquaculture and fishing interests to "cull" cormorant numbers to "acceptable" levels, and the reactions and visions of conservation groups. Wild examines both popular preconceptions about cormorants (what kinds of fish they eat and how much) and the effectiveness of ongoing efforts to control the cormorant population. Finally, the book delves into the question of climate and terrain changes, their consequences for cormorants, the new territories to which the birds must adapt, and the conflicts this species is likely to face going forward.

In 1987, the University of Chicago Press published Primate Societies, the standard reference in the field of primate behavior for an entire generation of students and scientists. But in the twenty-five years since its publication, new theories and research techniques for studying the Primate order have been developed, debated, and tested, forcing scientists to revise their understanding of our closest living relatives.

Intended as a sequel to Primate Societies, The Evolution of Primate Societies compiles thirty-one chapters that review the current state of knowledge regarding the behavior of nonhuman primates. Chapters are written by the leading authorities in the field and organized around four major adaptive problems primates face as they strive to grow, maintain themselves, and reproduce in the wild. The inclusion of chapters on the behavior of humans at the end of each major section represents one particularly novel aspect of the book, and it will remind readers what we can learn about ourselves through research on nonhuman primates. The final section highlights some of the innovative and cutting-edge research designed to reveal the similarities and differences between nonhuman and human primate cognition. The Evolution of Primate Societies will be every bit the landmark publication its predecessor has been.

In this comprehensive account of olfactory communication and territorial behavior in the Mongolian gerbil, Del Thiessen and PaulineYahr provide the first detailed study of the neurological and physiological mechanisms that control these basic functions. In addition to explaining the links between hormones, genes, olfactory cues, and territorial acts, they also offer a more general picture of gerbil behavior, as well as a brief look at other mammalian species that communicate social status by way of olfactory messages.

Territorial behavior, as defined by the authors, includes all acts that are restricted to a particular area and are crucial for successful reproduction. In the Mongolian gerbil, and probably in other mammals as well, territoriality is controlled by sex hormones acting on specific areas of the central nervous system. Hormones from the gonads apparently act in the brain by altering the genetic apparatus controlling biochemicals used in neural communication. Without these hormones, the animal is socially inert and unable to transmit genes to the next generation. The authors conclude from the results of over ten years of investigation that the most complex social interactions depend on the integrity of the hormone system and its constant tuning by olfactory stimuli.

The book incorporates a review of all previously known studies of gerbil behavior and representative data for many other scent-marking species. A stereotaxic brain atlas for the gerbil is a feature that will be especially helpful to other researchers. The book's eclectic nature should make it valuable to anyone concerned with territorial behavior, hormones and behavior, or brain processes, as well as to those who are specifically interested in the Mongolian gerbil.

It began in late winter of 2004. Almost 100 years had passed since the last spotting of a wild wolverine in Michigan when coyote hunters caught a glimpse of one of the animals in a frozen farm field in the northern thumb region. For the next six years, Jeff Ford, a local science teacher and amateur naturalist, devoted himself to locating and filming the wolverine that had unexpectedly and inexplicably appeared in the Wolverine State. By the time hikers found the animal dead in early 2010, Ford had taken hundreds of rare live action photos and shot numerous hours of video, with the story of the "Wolverine Guy" attracting national attention through countless newspaper and magazine articles and appearances on Animal Planet and PBS Nature.

This is the tale of Ford's quest as he uncovered answers to mysteries surrounding the animal's territory and movement patterns, while sparking a flurry of controversy surrounding the elusive predator's origin, much of which remains unresolved today. It's an intimate look at research in the raw, from DNA samples stuck on barbed wire to a sophisticated, motion-sensing infrared camera unit strategically placed to observe nocturnal behavior.

The Lone Wolverine brings to vivid life this unforgettable piece of American wildlife lore, using candid interviews, public records, and Ford's own vast storehouse of notes, personal writings, correspondence, and images, offering an extraordinary chronicle of a wild wolverine in its natural habitat, at play and in fierce competition for food and survival. This is a wildlife detective story, recounting years of study and fierce debate as researchers pondered the riddles of Michigan's last wolverine---her origins, habits, and ultimately the cause of her untimely death.