Get to know the lives and longings of animals in a city zoo in this time-honored tale from the author of Bambi. The animals of the city zoo miss their homes. While they appreciate the company of one another, they have a fierce longing to be free of the daily visitors, the city sounds—and most of all, the bars to their cages. Vasta the mouse is the only animal who is not behind bars. She uses her freedom to travel from cage to cage, visiting Yppa the orangutan and her young son Tikki, Hella the proud lioness and her two cubs, Mino the crazy fox, Pardinos the friendly elephant, and Hallo the tame wolf. The zookeepers and visitors have no idea what life is really like in this city jungle, but Felix Salten’s depiction of these animals’ stories is brought vividly to life in this beautiful repackage.

Discusses the lives of wild animals that live in a North American urban environment--

We tend to think of cities as a realm apart, somehow separate from nature, but nothing could be further from the truth. In Feral Cities, Tristan Donovan digs below the urban gloss to uncover the wild creatures that we share our streets and homes with, and profiles the brave and fascinating people who try to manage them. Along the way readers will meet the wall-eating snails that are invading Miami, the boars that roam Berlin, and the monkey gangs of Cape Town. From feral chickens and carpet-roaming bugs to coyotes hanging out in sandwich shops and birds crashing into skyscrapers, Feral Cities takes readers on a journey through streets and neighborhoods that are far more alive than we often realize, shows how animals are adjusting to urban living, and asks what messages the wildlife in our metropolises have for us.

Much has been written about the effects of British culture on colonized people, but this study suggests that the influence worked both ways. Focusing on the relationship between literature and metropolitan culture, it discusses the cultural confusion caused by bringing the foreign home.

Although the animals at the city zoo enjoy each other's friendship, they all long to be free of the daily visitors, the sounds of the city, and the cages.

Journey to thirty-eight big cities around the world and learn all about the amazing animals that live in them in this beautifully illustrated children's reference book! Did you know that there are wild boar on the streets of Berlin? Or that there are flying squirrels in New York City? From bats in air-conditioning vents to snakes in the sewers, there are surprising stories and incredible facts to discover around every corner! Kids will love learning about what kinds of animals make the cities near them their home! Packed with colorful illustrations, amazing maps, and hidden animals to find on each spread, this book takes young readers on a tour of thirty-eight cities around the world and will be a must-have in every house!

If they are to survive, cities need healthy chunks of the world’s ecosystems to persist; yet cities, like parasites, grow and prosper by local destruction of these very ecosystems. In this absorbing and wide-ranging book, Eldredge and Horenstein use New York City as a microcosm to explore both the positive and the negative sides of the relationship between cities, the environment, and the future of global biodiversity. They illuminate the mass of contradictions that cities present in embodying the best and the worst of human existence. The authors demonstrate that, though cities have voracious appetites for resources such as food and water, they also represent the last hope for conserving healthy remnants of the world’s ecosystems and species. With their concentration of human beings, cities bring together centers of learning, research, government, finance, and media—institutions that increasingly play active roles in solving environmental problems. Some of the topics covered in Concrete Jungle: --The geological history of the New York region, including remnant glacial features visible today --The early days of urbanization on Manhattan Island, focusing on the history of Central Park, Collect Pond, and Manhattan Square --The history of early railway lines and the development of New York’s iconic subway system --The problem of producing enough safe drinking water for an ever-expanding population --Prominent civic institutions, including universities, museums, and zoos

*Carrion crows in the Japanese city of Sendai have learned to use passing traffic to crack nuts. *Lizards in Puerto Rico are evolving feet that better grip surfaces like concrete. *Europe’s urban blackbirds sing at a higher pitch than their rural cousins, to be heardover the din of traffic. How is this happening? Menno Schilthuizen is one of a growing number of “urban ecologists” studying how our manmade environments are accelerating and changing the evolution of the animals and plants around us. In Darwin Comes to Town, he takes us around the world for an up-close look at just how stunningly flexible and swift-moving natural selection can be. With human populations growing, we’re having an increasing impact on global ecosystems, and nowhere do these impacts overlap as much as they do in cities. The urban environment is about as extreme as it gets, and the wild animals and plants that live side-by-side with us need to adapt to a whole suite of challenging conditions: they must manage in the city’s hotter climate (the “urban heat island”); they need to be able to live either in the semidesert of the tall, rocky, and cavernous structures we call buildings or in the pocket-like oases of city parks (which pose their own dangers, including smog and free-rangingdogs and cats); traffic causes continuous noise, a mist of fine dust particles, and barriers to movement for any animal that cannot fly or burrow; food sources are mainly human-derived. And yet, as Schilthuizen shows, the wildlife sharing these spaces with us is not just surviving, but evolving ways of thriving. Darwin Comes toTown draws on eye-popping examples of adaptation to share a stunning vision of urban evolution in which humans and wildlife co-exist in a unique harmony. It reveals that evolution can happen far more rapidly than Darwin dreamed, while providing a glimmer of hope that our race toward over population might not take the rest of nature down with us.

A stunning visual travelogue by an Indian tribal artist showing London as an exotic bestiary.