Bookcase: Animals

Is My Cat a Tiger?

ehuyck — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 17:55:37 -0400

Tigers and cats share a history, and some other things, like claws, and a tendency to pounce on mice, birds, and rapidly moving balls of string. This book will tell you everything you want to know about your cat's illustrious family tree, the history of cats and tigers, and how cats came to live with us. Unlike dogs, cats seem to have mostly domesticated themselves, by hanging around human farms where there were plenty of mice.

Go Wild in New York City

ehuyck — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 17:47:50 -0400

If you look around, like this book does, there's quite a lot of wilderness just about everywhere, even in the urban jungle of New York. Of course there's wild pigeons and rats, but cities can also be home to falcons, racoons, beavers, coyotes, and horseshoe crabs—not to mention all the things living under ground. This book is like a tour with lots of different subjects, that makes you see the city in a whole different way. And though it's about New York, I bet a lot of cities are the same way.

Wild Lives: A History of the People and Animals of the Bronx Zoo

ehuyck — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 17:39:22 -0400

When the Bronx zoo was founded in 1899, by a repentant taxidermist, most zoos were just collections of captive animals in bare cages. Zoos have changed a lot since then: now animals live together in open enclosures that resemble their natural habitats, and zoos are in the front line working to save endangered species and preserve wild spaces.

Animals in the House

ehuyck — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 15:51:54 -0400

Breakfast in the Rainforest

ehuyck — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 14:46:08 -0500

Somewhere in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in Uganda, the mountain gorillas have invited photographer Richard Sobel to breakfast--all he has to do is find them. Which he does, with some intrepid climbing and the help of local rangers whose job it is to protect (and locate) the gorillas. After breakfasting with them among the trees, I'll never look at gorillas in the zoo quite the same way again.

What's Smaller Than a Pygmy Shrew?

ehuyck — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 13:46:07 -0500

Mammoths and Mastodons

ehuyck — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 16:39:40 -0400

From 25 million to about 10,000 years ago, huge, hairy cousins of the elephants roamed the earth: the woolly mammoths and mastodons. This book will tell you everything you want to know about these remarkable creatures and their world. How did they live and behave? What did they eat? How are they related to elephants? How did early man hunt such big animals? And why did the mammoths disappear? Follow scientists as they study preserved mammoths, including baby Lyuba, to solve these big, furry mysteries of the ice age.

Animal Architects

ehuyck — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 12:04:43 -0400

Diggers, weavers, carpenters, bricklayers, and nomads—it's all in a day's work for the animal architects. Here you can see inside their structures and learn all their engineering secrets. Why do termites make different shaped mounds? How did the oven bird get its name? And why are honeycombs shaped that way?

Going, Going, Gone?

ehuyck — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 13:30:20 -0500

This book is an alphabetical catalog of some of the world’s most interesting endangered species of animals, plants, and insects. Each animal gets a page, telling where it lives, how many are left, threats it’s facing, and what you can do to help. There are also links and addresses for organizations working to help the animals (and fish and plants and insects). There are pandas and lions and rhinoceroses in this book, but also some you may not have heard of, like the Tsodilo daisy and the Jocototo antipitta.

What Mr Darwin Saw

ehuyck — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:58:09 -0500

Charles Darwin loved nature and first explained scientifically how species came to be. This is the story of a famous trip he took, sailing to South America and the Pacific on the ship Beagle, looking at all the amazing plants and animals and rocks. They made him think: Why did armadillos look so much like huge fossil skeletons? Why were there different finches and turtles on each island?