Archives de catégorie : Nature

SLEEP ACROSS THE ANIMAL KINGDOM de Barrett Klein, Niels Rattenborg, and John Lesku

An incredibly exciting and totally enlightening book about the dazzling range of sleeping habits of animals – mammals, birds, fish and insects – and how this can inform us about the evolution and benefits of human sleep.

SLEEP ACROSS THE ANIMAL KINGDOM
by Barrett Klein, Ph.D., Niels Rattenborg, Ph.D. and John Lesku, Ph.D.
Harvard University Press, 2026
(via The Martell Agency)

Written with wit, clarity, total narrative accessibility, and a keen sense of scientific adventure by three experts in the field, this project represents the best of popular science writing that readers today crave, joining together two subjects that are endlessly fascinating and relevant: the mysteries of sleep and animal behaviors. Perfect for readers of Ed Yong.

The book will cover such topics as:

• What is sleep? (vs. hibernation, or other forms of immobility)

• The diversity of sleep (from birds and mammals to roundworms, jellyfish, and the possibility for sleep in plants or single-celled organisms)

• Sleeping in strange ways and places (the strange locations where animals sleep and the unusual postures they can adopt, including sleep in flight, or while vertically-suspended underwater

• When sacrificing sleep is worth it (new recognition of the remarkable ability of some animals to sleep little, and yet side-step, or possibly endure, the negative consequences commonly observed in sleep-restricted humans)

• The comforts and dangers of sleeping with others (animals that sleep with other animals, such as parasites and social sleeping insects)

• Who else dreams?

• Sleeping in a disturbed world (both for screen-loving humans and urban wildlife living with light pollution).

Barrett Anthony Klein is Professor, Biology Department, University of Wisconsin – La Crosse, conducting research about sleep, learning, and communication, primarily with insects, and teaching courses in Animal Behavior, Entomology, Scientific Visualization, General Biology, and Organismal Biology. He is one of the featured scientists for a documentary about sleep (aired in Germany and on David Suzuki’s Nature of Things in Canada, and soon to come to the USA), and served as consultant for COSMOS: Possible Worlds. He has appeared on Wisconsin Public Radio and Wisconsin Public Television. Starting in 2023, he will lead a year-long series of online workshops through Johns Hopkins University, free and open to the public, on visualizing science and participate in a five-year effort, funded by the National Science Foundation, to help find solutions to the biodiversity crisis.

Dr. Niels Rattenborg, the leading world expert on sleep in birds, heads the Avian Sleep research group at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany. Rattenborg mission is to gain insight into the evolution and functions of sleep through studying birds. He is particularly interested in understanding how birds reconcile the inherent need for sleep with ecological demands for wakefulness, such as avoiding predation, competing for mates, and flying non-stop for weeks at a time. Rattenborg’s research has been published in top scientific journals, including Nature and Science, and is regularly featured in the international press (interviews for web, print, radio, and TV), spanning 25 languages (see detailed lists below). This includes, The New York Times, National Geographic, Smithsonian, Scientific American, Discover Magazine, Popular Science, The Wall Street Journal, The Times (London), The Guardian, Audubon, Greenpeace Magazine, Huffington Post, The Atlantic, Time Magazine, and Business Week.

John Andrew Lesku is Associate Professor and Lab Head, Sleep Ecophysiology Group School of Agriculture, Biomedicine and Environment at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. His work has been featured in Science and Current Biology and BBC News, Discover Magazine, LiveScience, NBC News, New Scientist, Science and CBC Radio (interview on As It Happens)

THE RETURN OF THE OYSTERCATCHER de Scott Weidensaul

From the New York Times best-selling author of A World on the Wing, an exploration of the efforts led by scientists, conservationists, and Indigenous peoples to save birds around the world.

THE RETURN OF THE OYSTERCATCHER:
Saving Birds to Save the Planet
by Scott Weidensaul
W. W. Norton, April 2026
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

As populations fall and once-great migration multitudes wither away, the future of birds may seem grim. But surprisingly, around the world, bird conservation is making things better. From the hyperlocal to the hemispherically immense, The Return of the Oystercatcher explores the recovery efforts that are not only preventing declines in bird populations but are helping them to thrive. Scott Weidensaul compiles amazing stories of hope and progress in some of the most unlikely places—from the resurgence of ducks in North America to the return of ospreys nesting in Southern Britain—to provide a road map of breathtaking environmental resilience. Because birds are so diverse, so ubiquitous, and cover virtually every square mile of the Earth’s surface, Weidensaul argues that by saving the birds we can also save the world. The result is an inspiring story of what’s working in bird conservation, recovery, and reintroduction, and what can work for the rest of the planet.

“Scott Weidensaul ranks among an elite group of writer-naturalists—Bruce Chatwin, John McPhee and David Quammen come to mind—whose straightforward eloquence elevates ecology to the level of philosophy.” —The Los Angeles Times Book Review

Scott Weidensaul is a Pennsylvania-based naturalist, most recently the New York Times bestseller A World on The Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds, and one of the most respected natural history writers in the country. He was a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction for his book Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere With Migratory Birds, and has written more than 30 other books on birds. He is a contributing editor to Audubon magazine and a columnist for Bird Watcher’s Digest. For the past 20 years Weidensaul has overseen one of the largest owl-migration research projects in the country, and he is one of fewer than 200 licensed hummingbird banders in the world.

HOW FLOWERS MADE OUR WORLD de David George Haskell

Flowers are beautiful revolutionaries. When they evolved, they remade the natural world. Almost all of nature now depends on them. We live on a floral planet, yet flowers don’t get the credit they deserve. We admire them for their beauty, not their world-changing power. In this revealing new book, internationally renowned nature writer David Haskell puts flowers back where they belong, at the center of the story about how our planet came to be and how it thrives today.

HOW FLOWERS MADE OUR WORLD:
Revolutions of Cooperation, Beauty, and Illusion
by David George Haskell
Viking, 2026
(via The Martell Agency)

Flowers are innovators. They used beauty to transform former enemies into cooperative partners. They reinvented plant growth, sex, and motherhood. Through genetic nimbleness, they turned past environmental upheavals into opportunities for renewal. This inventiveness allowed them to build and sustain rain forests, savannahs, prairies, and even ocean shores.

Flowers create opportunities for others. Butterflies and bees would not exist without them. Modern birds diversified in lockstep with flowers. Flowers shaped our species’ history, too. Grasses caused our ape ancestors to come down from the trees. Agriculture, with flowering plants at its heart, is the foundation of all modern civilizations.

Although flowers lack nerves, they created a language of beauty to converse with animals. We draw this conversation into human social networks, using cut blooms, floral aromas, and flower symbolism to mediate our signals to one another. Illusion is beauty’s companion. Flowers dupe many pollinators, and we use flowers to conceal, mask, or deflect. By breeding and growing flowers, we create both beauty and illusions: paradoxically, flowers produced by horticulture can be dangerous to pollinators.

The study of flowers revolutionized science and was a foundation of the horrors of colonialism. Today, we look to the resilience and genetic flexibility of flowering plants to help us face the crises of climate change and extinction. Flowers thrived in the face of past calamity and can do so again.

Flowers are the among most consequential creatures ever to have evolved, but no book to date centers and elevates this story, much of which has been discovered only in the last decade. Today, interest among the reading public in the wonders of plants is high, as is our need to learn from them. Now is a perfect time to celebrate the story of how flowers made our world.

David Haskell’s work integrates scientific, literary, and contemplative studies of the natural world. He is a professor of biology and environmental studies at the University of the South and a Guggenheim Fellow. His 2017 book The Songs of Trees won the John Burroughs Medal for Outstanding Nature Writing. His 2012 book The Forest Unseen and 2022 book Sounds Wild and Broken were both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and were shortlisted for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.

MOTHER, CREATURE, KIN de Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder

Luminous nonfiction about the natural world from essayist Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder, who asks: what can other-than-human creatures teach us about mothering, belonging, caregiving, loss, and resiliency?.

MOTHER, CREATURE, KIN:
What We Learn from Nature’s Mothers in a Time of Unraveling
by Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder
Broadleaf, March 2025
(via Kaplan/DeFiore Rights)

What does it mean to be a mother in an era of climate catastrophe? And what can we learn from the plants and creatures who mother at the edges of their world’s unraveling?

Becoming a mother in this time means bringing life into a world that appears to be coming undone. Drawing upon ecology, mythology, and her own experiences as a new mother, Steinauer-Scudder confronts what it means to « mother »: to do the good work of being in service to the living world. What if we could all mother the places we live and the beings with whom we share those places? And what if they also mother us?

In prose that teems with longing, lyricism, and knowledge of ecology, Steinauer-Scudder writes of the silent flight and aural maps of barn owls, of nursing whales, of real and imagined forests, of tidal marshes, of ancient single-celled organisms, and of newly planted gardens. The creatures inhabiting these stories teach us about centering, belonging, entanglement, edgework, homemaking, and how to imagine the future. Rooted in wonder while never shying away from loss, MOTHER, CREATURE, KIN reaches toward a language of inclusive care learned from creatures living at the brink.

Writing in the tradition of Camille Dungy, Elizabeth Rush, and Margaret Renkl, Steinauer-Scudder invites us into the daily, obligatory, sacred work of care. Despair and fear will not save the world any more than they will raise our children, and while we don’t know what the future holds, we know it will need mothers. As the very ground shifts beneath our feet, what if we apprenticed ourselves to the creaturely mothers with whom we share this beloved home?

Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder writes at the confluence of relationship to place with experiences of the sacred. She has a masters of theological studies from Harvard Divinity School and has worked as a staff writer and editor for Emergence Magazine, a publication exploring the intersection of ecology, culture, and spirituality. Her work has also been featured in The Common, The Slowdown, Crannóg Magazine, From the Ground Up, the edited poetry collection Writing the Land, and Katie Holten’s The Language of Trees. Having grown up in the Great Plains of Nebraska and Oklahoma, she and her family live in northern New England.

DOES EARTH FEEL? de Marc Majewski

A stunning and timely picture book asks fourteen critical questions to encourage active thinking and discussion about our one and only planet.

DOES EARTH FEEL?
14 Questions for Humans
by Marc Majewski
Kathrine Tegen Books/HarperCollins Children’s, February 2021

Does Earth feel calm?

Does Earth feel curious?

Does Earth feel hurt?

Does Earth feel heard?

With spare prose and evocative paintings, author-illustrator Marc Majewski implores readers to think more deeply about what our only planet is telling us, ultimately asking—what do you want Earth to feel?

This compelling narrative follows the planet’s relationship with humans and engages with themes around empathy and environmentalism; a perfect book to spark conversations and inspire a new generation of young leaders.

Marc Majewski is a French illustrator and picture book maker based in Berlin. As a child, Marc spent all his time drawing, writing stories, and dressing up. Things haven’t changed much since. Marc loves painting landscapes and scenes from the natural world. He is the author of several books, including DOES EARTH FEEL? and Butterfly Child, published with HarperCollins.