As a kid growing up in the northeast of England I became fascinated by the insects, flowers, birds, geology, and seashore life around me. That fascination with natural history never left me and I had the fortune to turn my childhood interests into a professional career as a research scientist, teacher, and writer. My work on pollinators and plants has taken me around the world, from the grasslands of Oxfordshire to the deserts of Namibia and the mountains of Nepal, from the rainforests of Brazil and Australia to the thorny shrublands of Tenerife. The result has been more than 135 articles plus a couple of books. I must get back to writing the next one…
For me, this is the book that really started the current drive to conserve pollinators in our rapidly changing world. Other authors had written about bees in particular, and how pesticides and habitat destruction were affecting them, but Steve Buchmann and Gary Nabhan were the first to bring all of the evidence together for a wide range of pollinators, including hummingbirds and bats as well as insects. This was an enormously influential book that helped to shape public opinion, global policies, and actions around pollinator conservation. It also influenced the research direction, and subsequently professional careers, of many ecologists and naturalists, myself included.
This work looks at the human impact on plants and the animals they depend upon for reproduction. As an increasing number of species are erased by pesticides or habitat disruption, 80 per cent of the human diet is threatened.
I bought this book for my daughter Ellen when she was 3 or 4
years old, and I think I was even more enchanted than she was! It's a
wonderfully told and illustrated story about the animals that live in
and around the giant saguaro cactuses in the deserts of the USA and
Mexico. The pollinators are birds during the day and bats at night,
and this book provides a child's-eye view of some of the science. Ellen is now 31...where
does the time go?
Children are our future and the ways in which we influence them will
have enormous consequences for the fate of our planet, including how
we conserve bees, birds, bats, and other pollinators. Books such as
this are so important – every child should have access to them, at
home, at school, or in public libraries.
It is another hot day in the desert. Birds and other animals scurry about looking for food. When they get tired they stop to rest at a giant cactus. It is their hotel in the desert!
Many different animals live in the cactus hotel. It protects them; and they protect it, by eating the pests that could harm the cactus.
The cactus grows larger and larger and will live for about two hundred years. When one animal moves out, another moves in. There is never a vacancy in the cactus hotel.
This story--about a desert, a giant cactus, and the…
Dave and I are old friends – we were PhD students together – and it’s been wonderful to see his career as a scientist and author develop over the last couple of decades. Probably no other single individual has had more of an influence on public opinion about pollinators, especially bumblebees. A Sting in the Tale is a fascinating and highly readable account of his research on these charismatic insects and his founding of the Bumblebee Conservation Trust. Informative, passionate, and amusing in equal proportions, just like the man himself!
Dave Goulson has always been obsessed with wildlife, from his childhood menagerie of exotic pets and dabbling in experimental taxidermy to his groundbreaking research into the mysterious ways of the bumblebee and his mission to protect our rarest bees.
Once commonly found in the marshes of Kent, the short-haired bumblebee is now extinct in the UK, but still exists in the wilds of New Zealand, descended from a few queen bees shipped over in the nineteenth century.
A Sting in the Tale tells the story of Goulson's passionate drive to…
This ground-breaking book was the first illustrated field guide to cover all of the more than 270 species of bees that occur in Great Britain and Ireland. It provides a detailed account of the natural history of these fascinating insects, plus photographs and taxonomic keys to help you to determine what they are. Be warned, however, as the author acknowledges, many bees are challenging to identify! Nonetheless, Falk and Lewington’s book is invaluable for anyone interested in the natural history of bees.
This is a brand new field guide to Britain's bees that for the first time makes this fascinating and important group of insects accessible to the general naturalist. The guide covers over 270 species, and is fully illustrated with stunning photographs and Richard Lewington's beautiful colour artwork.
Fig trees have a complex and fascinating mode of pollination involving tiny parasitic wasps that complete part of their life cycles within the fig “fruit” (actually a complex inflorescence of flowers). Some species of wasp actually carry pollen between flowers in special pouches on their bodies! Mike Shanahan’s book describes these extraordinary interactions in detail and then goes on to explain just why it is that the world’s fig trees are ecologically and culturally important. It’s partly a memoir based on his own travels and research, and is beautifully written and illustrated. I learned a lot about just how fascinating and vital figs are!
Fig trees have affected humanity in profound but little-known ways: they are wish-fulfillers, rainforest royalty, more precious than gold. Ladders to Heaven tells their incredible story.
They fed our pre-human ancestors, influenced diverse cultures and played a key role in the birth of civilisation. More recently, they helped restore life after Krakatoa's catastrophic eruption and proved instrumental in Kenya's struggle for independence.
Figs now sustain more species of bird and mammal than any other fruit - in a time of falling trees and rising temperatures, they offer hope. Theirs is a story about humanity's relationship with…
A unique and personal insight into the ecology and evolution of pollinators, their relationships with flowers, and their conservation in a rapidly changing world.
The pollination of flowers by insects, birds, and other animals is a fundamentally important ecological function that supports both the natural world and human society. Without pollinators to facilitate the sexual reproduction of plants, the world would be a biologically poorer place in which to live, there would be an impact on food security, and human health would suffer. Written by one of the world’s leading pollination ecologists, this book provides an introduction to what pollinators are, how their interactions with flowers have evolved, and the fundamental ecology of these relationships.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
