In a cozy room in northern Germany, a yellow canary sings rolling melodies to the miners and carpenters of the Harz mountains. But today a bird dealer has come, and he will take the canary far, far away from everything he knows. The journey leads onto trains and steamships, across Europe and even the Atlantic. At last the canary arrives in a room in New York where he hears a strangely familiar song… This beautiful, poignant book introduces readers to the little-known history of a beloved songbird. Lushly illustrated in rich colors, 189 Canaries is an unforgettable story about music, migration, and the search for home.

With this volume, the well-known author begins a three-part book series that will cover all breeding directions of canary breeding in a compact form. In volume 1, the interesting history of the Canary's development into a domestic bird is examined from partly new aspects. The book contains tried and tested advice on keeping, caring for and breeding canaries in a manner appropriate to their species, as well as on a balanced, largely natural diet. In addition to an introduction to the anatomy of birds, embryonic development and feather structure, the volume also deals with compactly compiled advice on the treatment of diseases and parasite infestations. The special section of the book explains the four most important song canary breeds and their songs. In addition, there are valuable tips on breeding the song-colour and song-posture canaries. This part of the book is rounded off with tips on breeding and training the song canaries.

Winner of the Consul Cremer Prize, The Red Canary follows the compelling quest to turn the green canary red. The creation of Dolly the sheep in the 1990s was for many people the start of a new era: the age of genetically modified animals. However, the idea was not new, for in the 1920s an amateur scientist, Hans Duncker, decided to genetically engineer a red canary. Favored originally for their voice, by the middle of the nineteenth century canaries had become so popular that millions were exported from Europe to the United States to satisfy demand. During the 1870s, English canary breeders caused a scandal by feeding their birds red peppers to turn them orange. In the 1930s, Duncker's genetics efforts caught the attention of the Nazi regime who saw him as a champion of their eugenic policies, even though his ingenious experiments were not successful. Nonetheless, Duncker's work paved the way thirty years later for an Englishman, Anthony Gill, and an American, Charles Bennett, to succeed, after recognizing that the red canary would need to be a product of both nature and nurture. In Tim Birkhead's masterful hands, this highly original narrative reveals how the obsession of bird keepers turned the wild canary from green to red, and in the process, heralded exciting but controversial developments in genetic manipulation.

Modern humans, descendants of a founding population that separated from chimpanzees some five to eight million years ago, are today the only living representative of a branching group of African apes called hominins. Because of its extraordinary size and shape, the baobab (Adansonia digitata L.) has long been identified as the most striking tree of Africa’s mosaic savanna, the landscape generally regarded as the environment of hominin evolution. This book makes the case for identifying the baobab as the tree of life in the hunter-gatherer adaptation that was the economic foundation of hominin evolution. The argument is based on the significance of the baobab as a resource-rich environment for the Hadza of northeastern Tanzania, who continue to be successful hunter-gatherers of the African savanna.