‘FASCINATING’ The Times

‘Matt Ridley is one of our finest science writers ? A treat for bird lovers and evolutionary biologists alike’ Richard Dawkins

Animals rarely treat sex as a simple or mutually beneficial transaction. Choosing a mate is often a transcendent event to be approached with reverence, suspicion, angst and quite a bit of violence. For Matt Ridley, nowhere is this more acute than in birds.

From a freezing hide on the Pennine moors at dawn, Ridley closely studies the rare Black Grouse. He is there for the lek – an elaborate courtship ritual of squabbling and strutting males. They dance and sing for hours each day to attract a mate over several months. With most males leaving exhausted and unsuccessful, Ridley looks at how females make their choice to cast fresh light on how such rituals have evolved and why.

His pursuit follows five generations of biologists from Darwin and Wallace to the present day, uncovering how they have grappled with the implications of sexual selection as an eccentric, gonzo form of evolution. While most Victorian scientists found it impossible to believe female birds could select mates, Darwin was obsessed with the idea of sexual as well as natural selection.

Drawing on his own lifelong passion, Ridley eavesdrops on the elaborate displays of bird species around the world, from the complex art installations made by Bowerbirds in Australia to the bubbling calls of Curlews in the UK’s declining moorlands. In a wonderful blend of nature writing and elegant exploration of recent evolutionary theory, Birds, Sex and Beauty shows not only how mate choice has shaped the natural world, including humans, but how the song and plumage of birds can be thrillingly, breathtakingly beautiful.

‘Clear and entertaining ? Ridley explains all this history with lucidity and wit’New Statesman

‘Most of this fascinating and accessible book is about birds ? Ridley, very clearly, loves birds – and the enthusiasm is infectious’The Times

‘This is a fascinating story told with wit, scholarship and the passion of a true conversationist. Lord Ridley writes in the best tradition of great British naturalists’ Country Life

‘Birds, Sex & Beauty is a good read. It is a compelling history of sexual selection, rather than a synthesis that moves the field forwards’Nature

‘Timely, elegiac’ – The Daily Mail
‘Superb storytelling . . . an exhilarating and vital book’ – Charles Foster, author of Cry of the Wild

Lost Wonders is a series of fascinating encounters with subjects that are now nowhere to be found on Earth. From giant tortoises to minuscule snails the size of sesame seeds, from ocean-hopping trees to fish that wag their tails like puppies, Tom Lathan brings these lost wonders briefly back to life and gives us a tantalizing glimpse of what we have lost within our own lifetime.

Drawing on the personal recollections of the people who studied these species, as well as those who tried but ultimately failed to save them, and with beautiful illustrations, Lost Wonders is an intimate portrait of the species that have only recently vanished from our world. It is also an urgent warning to hold on all the more tightly to those now slipping from our grasp.

Illustrated by Claire Kohda

Around 70,000 species call Britain home, but how many of them can be found here and only here? Join conservationist James Harding-Morris as he uncovers the stories of our endemic wildlife – the plants, animals and fungi that are unique to these islands.

Determined to give these irreplaceable species their moment in the spotlight, James goes in search of them across the length and breadth of Britain, from wild and rugged Orkney, the only known location for the Orkney vole, down to suburban Plymouth where the horrid ground-weaver spider faces global extinction at the hands of developers. He seeks out alien fungi on the roadsides of Norfolk, explores Devon’s depths in the hunt for ghostly cave shrimps, and traces the tribulations of interrupted brome, a grass that has gone extinct not once, but twice.

Along the way, James meets the experts devoted to the study and survival of these vanishingly rare creatures and plants, individuals working tirelessly – and often single-handedly – to save them from the brink of global extinction. Because many of these species are at risk of disappearing forever, before most of us have even realised they exist.

A tapestry of wonder and weirdness, tragedies and triumphs, Endemic celebrates what makes our natural history so special and calls on us all to cherish and protect it.

For millennia,
elms shaped our landscape and our folklore;
then they started dying.

For the past century, a deadly pandemic has raged across the world, destroying all in its path and outmanoeuvring scientists’ desperate attempts to halt it.

Dutch elm disease has killed hundreds of millions of trees globally and over 25 million in the UK alone, altering our landscapes forever. Few young people have seen a mature elm tree, yet they once covered great swathes of Europe and North America and their legacy lives on in our mythology.

The Lost Elms is a love letter to our vanished elms – the story of how we have nearly lost them all, and the long, slow fight back. It tells the gripping story of the scientists desperately trying to halt the disease’s relentless progress, and demonstrates the deadly effect globalisation can have on the environment, the threat of climate change, the importance of biosecurity and the intricate ways in which trees are interlinked with other species. Woven throughout is a lyrical look at the elm’s central place in our history, culture and folklore – the elm features heavily in Greek, Celtic, Japanese, Germanic and Scandinavian mythology; as the ‘Liberty Tree’ it played a symbolic role in both the American and French Revolutions; and since ancient times the elm has held associations with death and the supernatural.

However all is not lost: recent breakthroughs in ecological understanding reveal elms to be far more resilient than we ever imagined. This tree holds an important place in our history, and now might just offer hopeful lessons for how we can save other disappearing species and our environment.

Anyone alive today is among a tiny fraction of the once living: over 90% of species that ever existed are now extinct. How did we come to think of ourselves as survivors in a world where species can vanish forever, or as capable of pushing our planet to the verge of a sixth mass extinction?

Extinction, Sadiah Qureshi shows us, is a surprisingly modern concept – and a phenomenon that’s not as natural as we might think. In Europe until the late eighteenth century, species were considered perfect and unchanging creations of God. Then in the age of revolutions, scientists gathered enough fossil evidence to determine that mammoth bones, for example, were not just large elephants but a lost species that once roamed the Earth alongside ancient humans. Extinction went from being regarded as theologically dangerous to pervasive, and even inevitable.

Yet Vanished shows us that extinction is more than a scientific idea; it’s a political choice that has led to devasting consequences. Europeans and Americans quickly used the notion that extinction was a natural process to justify persecution and genocide, predicting that nations from Newfoundland’s Beothuk to Aboriginal Australians were doomed to die out from imperial expansion.

Exploring the tangled and unnatural histories of extinction and empire, Vanished weaves together pioneering original research and breath-taking storytelling to show us extinction is both an evolutionary process and a human act: one which illuminates our past, and may alter our future.

The great auk was a flightless, goose-sized bird superbly adapted for life at sea. Fat, flush with feathers and easy to capture, the birds were in trouble whenever sailors visited their once-remote breeding colonies. Places like Funk Island, off north-east Newfoundland, became scenes of unimaginable slaughter, with birds killed in their millions. By 1800 the auks of Funk Island were gone. A scramble by private collectors for specimens of the final few birds then began, a bloody, unthinking destruction of one of the world’s most extraordinary species.

But their extinction in 1844 wasn’t the end of the great auk story, as the bird went on to have a remarkable afterlife; skins, eggs and skeletons became the focus for dozens of collectors in a story of pathological craving and unscrupulous dealings that goes on to this day.

In a book rich with insight and packed with tales of birds and of people, Tim Birkhead reveals previously unimagined aspects of the bird’s life before humanity, its death on the killing shores of the North Atlantic, and the unrelenting subsequent quest for its remains.

The great auk remains a symbol of human folly and the necessity of conservation. This book tells its story.

‘Matt Ridley is one of our finest science writers ? A treat for bird lovers and evolutionary biologists alike’ Richard Dawkins

Animals rarely treat sex as a simple or mutually beneficial transaction. Choosing a mate is often a transcendent event to be approached with reverence, suspicion, angst and quite a bit of violence. For Matt Ridley, nowhere is this more acute than in birds.

From a freezing hide on the Pennine moors at dawn, Ridley closely studies the rare Black Grouse. He is there for the lek – an elaborate courtship ritual of squabbling and strutting males. They dance and sing for hours each day to attract a mate over several months. With most males leaving exhausted and unsuccessful, Ridley looks at how females make their choice to cast fresh light on how such rituals have evolved and why.

His pursuit follows five generations of biologists from Darwin and Wallace to the present day, uncovering how they have grappled with the implications of sexual selection as an eccentric, gonzo form of evolution. While most Victorian scientists found it impossible to believe female birds could select mates, Darwin was obsessed with the idea of sexual as well as natural selection.

Drawing on his own lifelong passion, Ridley eavesdrops on the elaborate displays of bird species around the world, from the complex art installations made by Bowerbirds in Australia to the bubbling calls of Curlews in the UK’s declining moorlands. In a wonderful blend of nature writing and elegant exploration of recent evolutionary theory, Birds, Sex and Beauty shows not only how mate choice has shaped the natural world, including humans, but how the song and plumage of birds can be thrillingly, breathtakingly beautiful.

‘A tour de force! Simply the best account – among a great many – of Darwin’s ground-breaking and far-reaching concept of sexual selection’ Tim Birkhead, author of The Wisdom of Birds

‘Superb storytelling . . . an exhilarating and vital book’ – Charles Foster, author of Cry of the Wild

Many scientists believe that we are currently living through the Earth’s sixth mass extinction, with species disappearing at a rate not seen for tens of millions of years – a trend that will only accelerate as climate change and other pressures intensify. What does it mean to live in such a time? And what exactly do we lose when a species goes extinct?

In a series of fascinating encounters with subjects that are now nowhere to be found on Earth – from giant tortoises to minuscule snails the size of sesame seeds, from ocean-hopping trees to fish that wag their tails like puppies – Tom Lathan brings these lost wonders briefly back to life and gives us a tantalising glimpse of what we have lost within our own lifetime.

Drawing on the personal recollections of the people who studied these species, as well as those who tried but ultimately failed to save them, and with beautiful illustrations, Lost Wonders is an intimate portrait of the species that have only recently vanished from our world and an urgent warning to hold on all the more tightly to those now slipping from our grasp.

Illustrated by Claire Kohda

There are over 20,000 species of bees worldwide and only a handful of those actually make honey. Some live in colonies but others are solitary. We can all help protect them – and they desperately need protecting – but you can’t save what you don’t love. And you can’t love what you don’t know.

The Good Bee is a celebration of this most vital and mysterious of nature’s wizards. Here you’ll discover the complexities of bee behaviour – as well as the intriguing bits that continue to baffle us – the part they play in the natural world, their relationship with us throughout history, how they are already under serious threat, and, crucially, what we can all do about it.

Beautifully produced, with hand-made illustrations throughout, this is an essential handbook and a book to treasure.