Explore the vast range of titles available.

This article discusses the ‘new nature writing’ and the work of some of its key practitioners: Mark Cocker, Roger Deakin, Kathleen Jamie, Richard Mabey and Robert Macfarlane. The new nature writing focuses on finding meaning not in the rare and exotic but in our common, unremarkable encounters with the natural world, and in combining both scientific, scholarly observation of nature with carefully crafted, discursive writing. In this sense it speaks to a contemporary eco-political moment while critically engaging with the rich history of nature writing and thinking about the environment in Britain from the Romantic era onwards, and particularly since the late 1960s.

Spring returns and with it the birds. But it also brings throngs of birders who emerge, binoculars in hand, to catch a glimpse of a rare or previously unseen species or to simply lay eyes on a particularly fine specimen of a familiar type. In a delightful meditation that unexpectedly ranges from the Volga Delta to Central Park and from Charles Dickens's Hard Times to a 1940s London burlesque show, Jeremy Mynott ponders what makes birds so beautiful and alluring to so many people. Princeton Shorts are brief selections taken from influential Princeton University Press books and produced exclusively in ebook format. Providing unmatched insight into important contemporary issues or timeless passages from classic works of the past, Princeton Shorts enable you to be an instant expert in a world where information is everywhere but quality is at a premium.

Hebden was featured on the Steve Lamacq Show as part of the Independent Music Venue week and it has to be on everyone’s bucket list of music venues to visit. A mention must be made of the support act, Life, an indie punk quartet who hail from Hull, and have a frontman who is a mixture of Jarvis Cocker, Mark E Smith and the Kaiser Chief’s Ricky Wilson (early years of course).

In \"Birders,\" English author [Mark Cocker], a 30-year bird-watcher and twitcher, recalls stories from his circle of fanatics -- grandly calling the yarns part of birding's \"oral tradition.\" Readers could conclude that British birders are different. But this isn't a book about all British birders, only about Cocker's. And that group is about competition, not missing a rare visit by a rare bird, one-upmanship, gaining status and putting birding first - - with few exceptions. Most birders on this side of The Pond are more egalitarian and inclusive than those Cocker knows, and some of the attitudes and behaviors in \"Birders\" are offensive. American readers wanting to know what birding is like might be happier reading William Burt's \"Rare and Elusive Birds\" and Pete Dunne's \"Feather Quest.\" Both soar on their sense of wonder, desire to teach and engaging writing.

One thing I've learned from my patch is that managing habitat for wildlife is not so much a plan implemented as a prayer offered. And this prayer cost much sweat. For weeks I heaved sodden vegetation on to what's known in our household as Slub Mountain (or, worse, Pater's Folly). It's a mound of nutrient-rich waste that had previously been hauled out of the dyke or cut from the reed. At times it stood two metres tall but this has gradually rotted down to a chest-high heap. It's a paradise for those small, dark, ground-scuttling arachnids called wolf spiders. Occasionally a red admiral rests on its sunny slopes. But for long months there was not the faintest trace of its intended occupant.

It was there beside me in the vegetation while I was photographing flowers, but it took me minutes to spot it. An exquisite latticework of black lines was wrapped around a soft 8cm tube of khaki green. That fractured pattern, like shattered glass or silk webbing, had earlier harmonised with the interplay of light, shadow and the hundred vertical lines of plant stems. Now it stared at me, silver eyes glowing - an elephant hawk-moth caterpillar. The odd name derives from the trunk-like structure at the creature's anterior end.

It's hard to say which was more unpleasant: the bruising grind of a JCB as its immense orange limb lugged up bucketfuls of slub from the dyke. Or was it the foul envelope of methane that cloaked me when the black slurry was pitched on to the field edge. Yet even this workaday scene had its inner eye of grace. As I passed the machine, a grey heron launched itself unwillingly and ploughed off, its breastbone resting heavy on the damp air.

It's agreeable, the bird life of Kew, but you wouldn't say it was special; at least, I wouldn't have done, until last Saturday, when I took Mark Cocker there. Mark is a naturalist and writer familiar to many people as the author of Birds Britannica, the riveting encyclopaedia of the cultural aspects of our avifauna; he is also, on a more basic level, one of Britain's leading birders, able to look at a dot two hundred yards away and tell you it's a black redstart. Yet his visual skills are if anything exceeded by his aural skills; Mark has head-turning expertise with birdsong. He began with siskins, those charming glowing-green finches, and then picked up the calls of their cousins, goldfinches, and the much less familiar redpolls; then it was the turn of goldcrests, and coal tits, and long-tailed tits and great spotted woodpeckers, and then redwings and mistle thrushes, and a teal on the nearby Thames, while all the time the parakeets were screaming their heads off all around us. In Queen Charlotte's Cottage Gardens, the wooded area, he suddenly said to me: \"There's a predator about.\" The blue tits had begun giving alarm calls; sure enough, a few seconds later, a sparrowhawk flashed past.

I came across it at the edge of a lake when the Maya guides got excited and started shouting and looking at something just inside the lake shore forest. I peered through the branches and saw a rainbow, or that's what it seems like in memory: a glowing mixture of iridescent bronze, and green, and blue, with a lustrously brilliant blue head and neck: an ocellated turkey, the second of the world's two turkey species. For [Mark Cocker] is now engaged in producing Birds and People, a close look at human relations with all the birds in the world; you'll be able to enjoy his lengthy turkey disquisition on publication, and you won't be disappointed. Mark Cocker's Birds and People promises to be the most ambitious mapping ever undertaken of the cultural significance of birds: a doorstep-sized 400 000-word account of how humans have interacted with every family of the 10 000 bird species found across the globe - from eagles to doves, from swallows to storks, from robins to ravens.

The Yucatn is a special place, a riverless limestone world with a dozen or so bird species found nowhere else, and one of them is a turkey; but not the traditional wild turkey. I came across it at the edge of a lake when the Maya guides got excited and started shouting and looking at something just inside the lake shore forest. I peered through the branches and saw a rainbow, or that's what it seems like in memory: a glowing mixture of iridescent bronze, and green, and blue, with a lustrously brilliant blue head and neck: an ocellated turkey, the second of the world's two turkey species. It was one of those moments when the plates of your perception suddenly shift: here was the turkey as object of aesthetic admiration, not as object of appetite. And since then, I have broadened my ornithological interest to its fellow species in North America, the bird which went on to the first Thanksgiving dinner table: a creature with such a resonance in the American imagination that it was Benjamin Franklin's candidate for the US national bird, in place of the bald eagle. I asked Mark Cocker, the naturalist and writer who is the author of the encyclopaedic Birds Britannica, about turkeys as birds, and he responded with a flood of folklore, from where the name turkey came from, to what it meant to the Aztecs. For Mark is now engaged in producing Birds and People, a close look at human relations with all the birds in the world; you'll be able to enjoy his lengthy turkey disquisition on publication, and you won't be disappointed.