When Mike Tomkies moved to a remote cottage on the shores of Loch Shiel in the West Highlands of Scotland, he found a place which was to provide him with the most profound wilderness experience of his life. Accessible only by boat, the cottage he renamed ‘Wildernesse’ was to be his home for many years, which he shared with his beloved German Shepherd, Moobli. Centred on different landscape elements – loch, woodlands and mountains –Tomkies describes the whole cycle of nature through the seasons in a harsh and testing environment of unrivalled beauty. Vivid colours and sounds fill the pages – exotic wild orchids, the roar of rutting stags, the territorial movements of foxes, otters and badgers, an oak tree being torn apart by hurricane-force gales. Nothing escapes his penetrating eye. His extraordinary insights into the wildlife that shared his otherwise empty territory were not gained without perseverance in the face of perilous hazards, and the difficulties and challenges of life in the wilderness are a key part of this remarkable book.

Continuing the work it began in Hotspots, Conservation International identifies thirty-seven vital wilderness areas around the world, including tropical rainforests, arctic tundra, deserts, and wetlands, using more than five hundred stunning color photographs to illuminate the rich diversity of each region.

From the author of The Old Ways and Underland, an "eloquent (and compulsively readable) reminder that, though we're laying waste the world, nature still holds sway over much of the earth's surface." --Bill McKibben Winner of the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature and a finalist for the Orion Book Award Are there any genuinely wild places left in Britain and Ireland? That is the question that Robert Macfarlane poses to himself as he embarks on a series of breathtaking journeys through some of the archipelago's most remarkable landscapes. He climbs, walks, and swims by day and spends his nights sleeping on cliff-tops and in ancient meadows and wildwoods. With elegance and passion he entwines history, memory, and landscape in a bewitching evocation of wildness and its vital importance.

"A hugely inventive adventure." —Eoin Colfer, New York Times bestselling author of the Artemis Fowl series In a world where animals are slowly fading into extinction, twelve-year-old Kester Jaynes feels as if he hardly exists either. He’s been locked away in a home for troubled children and is unable to speak a word. Then one night, a flock of talking pigeons and a bossy cockroach come to help him escape, and he discovers that he can speak—to them. And the animals need him. Only Kester, with the aid of a stubborn, curious girl named Polly, can help them survive. The animals saved Kester. But can he save them? "When ninety-nine pigeons smash through the windows of Kester's prison and carry him North to the last of the animals…. it's a moment as thrilling as when James flies off in the Giant Peach. Highly recommended" —The Times (UK) “Combines a great fondness for animals with an appreciation of the freakish…. The reserved narrative tone and tender yet peculiar view of animals give this piece its own offbeat flavor.” —Kirkus Reviews “Alternately somber, thrilling, and silly.” —Publishers Weekly

Includes and excerpt from The last wild.

In Wild Thoughts from Wild Places, award-winning journalist David Quammen reminds us why he has become one of our most beloved science and nature writers. This collection of twenty-three of Quammen's most intriguing, most exciting, most memorable pieces introduces kayakers on the Futaleufu River of southern Chile, where Quammen describes how it feels to travel in fast company and flail for survival in the river's maw. Readers learn of the commerce in pearls (and black-market parrots) in the Aru Islands of eastern Indonesia. Quammen even finds wildness in smog-choked Los Angeles -- embodied in an elusive population of urban coyotes, too stubborn and too clever to surrender to the sprawl of civilization. With humor and intelligence, David Quammen's Wild Thoughts from Wild Places also reminds us that humans are just one of the many species on earth with motivations, goals, quirks, and eccentricities. Expect to be entertained and moved on this journey through the wilds of science and nature.

A complex story about small town life and displacement—both of humans and of wildlife. Chip Martin's life is going well, but now everything is beginning to fragment. His brother Justin's away at college and his sister Kate is busy with her high school activities. His single mom's lifelong friendship with Booker Wilson has suddenly taken a romantic turn, and now his best friend Luther won't speak to him. Even worse, Chip has to face the possibility of being uprooted. Chip's feelings of dislocation are compounded when he meets kids at his community center who are refugees, left homeless in the aftermath of a recent hurricane along the Florida Panhandle. But then Chip discovers something unbelievable—a family of Florida panthers that have been driven out of their home in the Everglades. Chip is alarmed when he hears that the last few acres of the woods are to be cleared to make way for a meat-packing plant. When he tries to protect the panthers, he learns that he has more friends than he thought. Author Rosa Jordan's memorable, well-drawn characters are woven together into a web of complex relationships marked by the challenges of displacement.

In this memoir, Kathryn Hulme, a United Nations relief officer in Bavaria from 1945 until 1951, records the daily life, hopes and struggles of over 100,000 Displaced Persons housed by UNRRA at Wildflecken, a former training camp for Nazi SS troops, and in other DP camps. “[A]n unforgettable report on the struggle, the plight, the defeat or the eventual redemption of countless victims of the time.” — George Shuster, The New York Times “A shattering book, and one that defines, once and for all, the meaning of that ghastly twentieth-century invention, the displaced person.” — The New Yorker “The Wild Place is a rare book — powerful and exciting, compassionate and disturbing, tragic and funny — drawn from great and strange material. It is a verbatim record of the most dramatic human debris of our time, the homeless hordes left on deposit in Germany.” — The New Yorker “Little has been recorded of the heroic postwar work with masses of displaced persons, and it will be hard to find a better account than this. It is crowded with people and incidents and has a special vitality as well as the ring of truth. Highly recommended.” — Library Journal “Miss Hulme’s story will seize your imagination, keep you fascinated, rouse your compassion, admiration, and respect... The top book of American nonfiction published this year...” — San Francisco Chronicle “A beautiful book, heartbreaking and at the same time veined with humor. It projects the passionate sense of purpose experienced by a compassionate woman struggling desperately to salvage human lives, and it leaves us with a quickened awareness of the astounding tenacity of the human spirit, the astounding durability of hope.” — The Atlantic Monthly “A sensitive and moving report, by an UNRRA field worker, of her five years’ experience in European D.P. camps after the war.” — Henry L. Roberts, Foreign Affairs “A deeply felt and deeply moving record of this whole tragedy of displacement and dispossession, this is certain to engage the heart of any reader who has one.” —Kirkus Reviews

2015 National Outdoor Book Award Winner: Design & Artistic Merit A collection of unparalleled photographs—spanning forty years and seven continents—by one of the world’s foremost wildlife photographers. Capturing the splendor of wild places and intimate moments with animals, this luxurious volume chronicles legendary nature photographer Thomas D. Mangelsen’s photographic adventures in the field. Driven by a passion for sharing and preserving the Earth’s last great wild places, Mangelsen is as much a conservationist as a natural history photographer and artist. From majestic elephants and giraffes on the plains of Kilimanjaro to polar bears in the Arctic, and from mountains and prairies to primordial jungles, Mangelsen invites us to witness fleeting wildness. A quiet call to action, an inventory of our planet as it battles climate change, and a celebration of wildness and its intrinsic value, The Last Great Wild Places is a record of the Earth’s last great locales, one that will inspire present and future generations with the message that what we have can, and must, be saved.

Since the last wild bison found refuge on the back of a nickel, the public image of natural Kansas has progressed from Great American Desert to dust bowl to flyover country that has been landscaped, fenced, and farmed. But look a little harder, George Frazier suggests, and you can find the last places where tenacious stretches of prairie, forest, and wetland cheat death and incubate the DNA of lost, wild America. Documenting three years spent roaming the state in search of these hidden treasures, The Last Wild Places of Kansas is Frazier's idiosyncratic and eye-opening travelogue of nature's secret holdouts in the Sunflower State. These are places where extirpated mammalian species are making comebacks; where flying squirrels leap between centuries-old trees lit by the unearthly green glow of foxfire; where cold springs feed ancient watercress pools; where the ice moon paints the Smoky Hills with memories of the buffalo, wolf, and the lonesome rattle of false indigo; where the blue lid of the sky forms a vacuum seal over treeless pastel hills, orange in winter; where bluestem rises. Some are impossible to find on maps. Most are magnificently bereft of anything beneficial to 99.9 percent of modern America. True wildernesses they may not be, but at the correct angle of light, when the wind blows pollen carrying biological memories of the glaciers, these places are a crack between the worlds, portals to the lost buffalo wilderness. En route Frazier takes us from the unexpected wilds of the Kansas City suburbs to the Cimarron National Grassland in the far southwestern corner of the state. He visits ancient springs, shares a beer with prairie dog hunters, and fails in his mission to canoe the upper Marais des Cygnes—a trip that requires permission from every landowner on the route. Along the way we encounter a host of curious characters—ranchers, farmers, Native Americans, explorers, wildlife experts, and outdoor enthusiasts—all fellow travelers in a quest to know, preserve, and share the last wild places of Kansas.