Nature

2023 IPPY Gold Award Winner | Animals/Pets

An elegant manifesto for improving life―and death―for all beings on sacred Mother Earth

"If there is one book you choose to read about how to enjoy and improve your relationships with animals and fully appreciate who they truly are, this is the one." ― MARC BEKOFF, author of The Emotional Lives of Animals and other books; Professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder

Combining humorous anecdotes and thought-provoking research, Sacred Sendoffs explores human relationships with beloved pets, wild creatures, animal astronauts, marine life, farmed animals, and other sentient beings. Along the way, animal chaplain Sarah Bowen shares insights for sustaining their lives, honoring deaths, and managing the emotions that arise when we lose an animal we love. While many books focus exclusively on pet loss, animal welfare, or environmental issues, Bowen’s ever curious and playful style takes on all three, revealing their unavoidable entanglement. Sacred Sendoffs helps animal lovers uncover practical actions and everyday opportunities for helping the more-than-human world thrive.

“Bowen covers a great deal of ground here, creating a new paradigm for thinking about the way we treat our closest companions and fellow beings. And she offers hope for the future, reminding us that learning to value animals in life and death may be the first step toward saving our beloved planet.” ― Book Review, Spirituality & Health Magazine

A groundbreaking collection that explores human–animal relations and deaths with depth and hope

When Animals Die is an innovative collection of essays that delves into the intricate and uneasy dynamics between humans and other-than-human animals, particularly concerning animal deaths, which are predominantly caused by humans. This groundbreaking book brings together prominent scholars from various disciplines to address the challenging field of animal death studies, incorporating perspectives from social sciences, humanities, biological sciences, and perspectives from beyond academia.

The collection explores profound questions about the experience of animal death for both animals and humans. It examines how humans rationalize animal deaths and utilize deceased animals, and sheds light on the interconnectedness of animal death with issues like race, colonialism, gender, capitalism, and other systems of inequality that humans have established and perpetuated.

By confronting these pertinent issues, When Animals Die seeks to deepen our awareness of the relationship between animal death and humanity’s involvement in it. While grappling with the reality of humans’ impact on the earth, the collection offers hope for an alternative future that does not entail the mutual destruction of human and other-than-human animals.

If, as many argue, movies and television have become Western culture's premier storytelling media, so too have they become, for most members of society, the primary source of encounters with the natural world—particularly wild animals. The television fare offered nightly by national and cable networks such as PBS and the Discovery Channel provides millions of viewers with their only experience of the wilderness and its inhabitants.

The very films that so many viewers take as accurate portrayals of wildlife, however, have evolved primarily as a form of entertainment, following the established codes and conventions of narrative exposition. The result has been not the representation of nature, but its wholesale reconstruction and reconfiguration according to film and television conventions, audience expectations, and the demands of competition in the media marketplace.

Wildlife Films traces the genealogy of the nature film, from its origins as the "animal locomotion" studies that mark the very beginnings of motion pictures themselves, to the founding of the Animal Planet cable channel that boasts "all animals, all the time." The narrative and thematic elements that unite wildlife films as a genre have their roots not in the documentary film tradition, but in the older traditions of oral and written animal fables as reflections of human society. Derek Bousé contends that classic wildlife films often portray animal protagonists living in families modeled on an ideal of the human nuclear family and working in communities that resemble an ideal of bucolic human society. In these stories—presented as documentaries—animals are motivated by human emotions and conduct relationships according to human customs. This imposition of culturally satisfying narrative patterns upon the lives of animals has not only led to the misrepresentation of the natural world; it has promoted the notion that our values, our moral vision, our models of society and family structure derive from nature, rather than being cultural formations.

Internationally celebrated nature writer Candace Savage presents the Corvid family— surprisingly bright, brassy, and colorful birds—in a remarkable collection of full-color, close-up photographs by some of the world’s best wildlife photographers. 

Birds have long been viewed as the archetypal featherbrains—beautiful but dumb. But according to naturalist Candace Savage, “bird brain,” as a pejorative expression, should be rendered obsolete by new research on the family of corvids: crows and their close relations.

The ancients who regarded these remarkable birds as oracles, bringers of wisdom, or agents of vengeance were on the right track, for corvids appear to have powers of abstraction, memory, and creativity that put them on a par with many mammals, even higher primates. Bird Brains presents these bright, brassy, and surprisingly colorful birds in a remarkable collection of full-color, close-up photographs by some two dozen of the world’s best wildlife photographers.

Savage’s lively, authoritative text describes the life and behavior of sixteen representative corvid species that inhabit North America and Europe. Drawing on recent research, she describes birds that recognize each other as individuals, call one another by “name,” remember and relocate thousands of hidden food caches, engage in true teamwork and purposeful play, and generally exhibit an extraordinary degree of sophistication.

As its sister title, A Californian's Guide to the Trees Among Us, did for arboreal varieties, this new guidebook introduces casual birders to 120 of California's most easily seen bird species—native and exotic alike—as found in a mix of urban, suburban, and traditionally natural habitats.

Full-color images and clear, direct descriptions make identification easy, and author Charles Hood supplements the essential information with surprising facts and trivia, including endangered-species recovery stories and the world record for grasshoppers eaten by one flycatcher in a single day. In sections addressing which gear to buy, where to go birdwatching, and how to read a birdsong transcription, Hood encourages readers to take ownership of their experiences, no matter their level of ornithological expertise. This accurate, lively, and even quotable guide will inspire people to notice nature more closely and find joy in interacting with the astounding diversity of avian life in California.

“Papa Goose is destined to become a classic. This book has everything in it I love: great animals beautifully portrayed as individuals; cool science; drama, discovery, and personal transformation.” 
—Sy Montgomery, author of Birdology and The Soul of An Octopus

The charming true story of one man’s journey to raise seven goslings in the name of science.

In Papa Goose, Michael Quetting shares the hilarious and moving true story of how he became a father to seven rambunctious goslings—and the surprising things he learned along the way. Starting right at the beginning, with the eggs, his journey takes him from the incubator all the way to the airstrip, where he must attempt to teach the geese to fly as part of an ambitious scientific research initiative for the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, which tracks animal migrations around the world. For the next eleven months, we follow the newly minted dad as he takes the goslings on daily swims in the lake, tracks them down when they go astray, and watches their personalities develop: feisty, churlish, and lovable. Packed with charm and humor, Papa Goose quickly draws us into the adventure as Gloria, Nemo, and the rest of the crew conquer land, water, and air.

An illustrated obsession, a guidebook, a kaleidoscope of life on the wing.

Liam O'Brien has spent three decades chasing, learning about, protecting, occasionally catching, and always loving butterflies. Here, he shares his capacious knowledge of California butterflies through a treasure trove of stories and 700 gorgeous, hand-drawn illustrations—featuring both adult forms and caterpillars—of the 135 species that live in the greater Bay Area. This sumptuous book also shares practical tips for finding and identifying all the butterflies who call the Bay Area home. Learn which plants nurture Silver-spotted Skippers, which trail to hike to see Swallowtails flitting creek-side, and why so many butterflies cluster on hilltops. Share in the joy that O'Brien brings to the study of butterflies, and join the community scientists contributing to our understanding of Monarchs, Metalmarks, and Marbles—and what they need to survive and thrive in our busy Bay Area.

The first book on the birds of California's oaks, from our most lyrical and observant wanderer of the woods.

With charm and delight, The Birds in the Oaks introduces us to the birds who burrow, forage, and soar among California's keystone trees. The mighty oak hosts a multitude of avian denizens—from canopy hoppers to ground nesters to short-billed surface pluckers—who rely on the trees' well-stocked pantry of acorns, insects, and flowers for sustenance and shelter. Spunky kinglets, crimson-eyed towhees, cuddle-craving bushtits, intrepid nuthatches, and impudent wrens are among the many memorable cast members in this pageant of oak-allied birds.

Jack Gedney lyrically conveys the beautiful, comic, and endearing qualities of over fifteen bird species, each profile paired with an illustration by Angelina Gedney. His bird-filled tales of adaptation, ingenuity, and sheer persistence also bring to light the warp and weft of cross-species interdependence. The Birds in the Oaks reveals to us the utter joy of birds, the superabundant world of the oaks, and the innumerable interconnections these living beings create.

A beautiful, photo-rich companion book to the internationally distributed IMAX film of the same name, Wings Over Water celebrates the prairie wetlands of North America and the birds that live and breed in this critical habitat.

Covering 300,000 square miles stretching from Canada through Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Iowa, the prairie wetlands are one of Earth’s most important, yet little-known, ecosystems. More than half of all North American migratory waterfowl and 96 species of songbirds breed and nest there, and more than 60 percent of the continent’s ducks are hatched there. Wings Over Water immerses readers in this awe-inspiring, essential region, using more than 300 breathtaking photos and inspiring essays from some of North America’s foremost conservationists to shine a spotlight on these critical breeding grounds and the need to protect them.

Wings Over Water is a joint venture of the Max McGraw Wildlife Foundation, which works to secure the future of hunting, fishing, and land management; Ducks Unlimited Inc., Wetlands America Trust, and Ducks Unlimited Canada, the world’s largest nonprofit organizations dedicated to conserving North America’s disappearing wetland and waterfowl habitats; and the National Audubon Society, the world’s oldest nonprofit environmental organization dedicated to bird conservation.

This up-close, captivating look at an iconic animal traces our complex relationship to bears throughout history—and what they can tell us about ourselves. 

On Being a Bear draws on history, legends, scientific studies, and the author’s thirty years of observing bears around the world to offer a richly detailed biography of these iconic animals, including the many ways bears have figured in our lives and imaginations.

As author Rémy Marion tells us, some cultures view bears as our wild cousins—as humans cloaked in fur—while others cast bears as cuddly characters in cartoons or seek to eradicate their grizzled forms from civilization. Scientists have made new discoveries into bears’ varied diets, their powerful sense of smell, and a mother bear’s stubborn patience with her cubs. Bears play a vital role in our ecosystems, and new studies into bear hibernation could lead to medical breakthroughs for humans. Offering these and more astonishing insights, On Being a Bear brings readers face-to-face with these long admired, feared, and misunderstood animals, and sets the record straight through a combination of thrilling science and expert storytelling.

Questions the treatment of laboratory animals in biomedical research

Laboratory animals are often used to develop medical treatments: vaccines, antibiotics, and organ transplants have all relied upon animal testing to ensure safety and success for human benefit. Yet the relationship between the scientific community's dependence on laboratory animals and the recognition of the need to treat these animals with respect and compassion has given rise to a profound tension.
As animals are increasingly understood to have rights and autonomy, Carrie Friese posits that, while care and compassion for a distant other who suffers are central to humanitarianism, the idea of a distant other itself, which has shaped work with laboratory animals both historically and today, has enacted forms of highly problematic paternalism, creating a double bind. Focusing on the lives of laboratory mice and rats in the United Kingdom, and on the people who take care of, and often kill, these animals, Friese gives the name of “more-than-human humanitarianism” to contradictory practices of suffering and compassion, killing and sacrifice, and compassion and consent that she witnessed in a variety of animal facilities and laboratories.

Friese proposes a new approach to the treatment of laboratory animals that recognizes the interconnectedness of all species and how human actions impact the welfare of other species and the planet as a whole. A Mouse in a Cage is an essential contribution to the ongoing conversation about the ethical treatment of animals.

Questions the treatment of laboratory animals in biomedical research

Laboratory animals are often used to develop medical treatments: vaccines, antibiotics, and organ transplants have all relied upon animal testing to ensure safety and success for human benefit. Yet the relationship between the scientific community's dependence on laboratory animals and the recognition of the need to treat these animals with respect and compassion has given rise to a profound tension.
As animals are increasingly understood to have rights and autonomy, Carrie Friese posits that, while care and compassion for a distant other who suffers are central to humanitarianism, the idea of a distant other itself, which has shaped work with laboratory animals both historically and today, has enacted forms of highly problematic paternalism, creating a double bind. Focusing on the lives of laboratory mice and rats in the United Kingdom, and on the people who take care of, and often kill, these animals, Friese gives the name of “more-than-human humanitarianism” to contradictory practices of suffering and compassion, killing and sacrifice, and compassion and consent that she witnessed in a variety of animal facilities and laboratories.

Friese proposes a new approach to the treatment of laboratory animals that recognizes the interconnectedness of all species and how human actions impact the welfare of other species and the planet as a whole. A Mouse in a Cage is an essential contribution to the ongoing conversation about the ethical treatment of animals.