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The scientific study of birds in arid regions has been conducted more or less intensively for about 40 years. This is an appropriate time to draw together the threads of the diverse research on birds living in such an extreme environment. Topics include: Desert Avifaunas; Food and Energy; Water - Drinking; Water Regulation; Thermoregulation; Timing of Breeding; Ecology of Breeding.
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In the 1950s the colonial British government in Northern and Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zambia and Zimbabwe) began construction on a large hydroelectric dam that created Lake Kariba and dislocated nearly 60,000 indigenous residents. Three decades later, Pamela Reynolds began fieldwork with the Tonga people to study the lasting effects of the dispossession of their land on their lives. In The Uncaring, Intricate World Reynolds shares her field diary, in which she records her efforts to study children and their labor and, by doing so, exposes the character of everyday life. More than a memoir, her diary captures the range of pleasures, difficulties, frustrations, contradictions, and grappling with ethical questions that all anthropologists experience in the field. The Uncaring, Intricate World concludes with afterwords by Jane I. Guyer and Julie Livingston, who critically reflect on its context, its meaning for today, and relevance to conducting anthropological work.
We've all got one. A secret, special place. Hidden. Enclosed. A little greener and more fertile than the world outside. Here the birds are slightly more exotic, slightly more confiding, the grass greener and the fruit sweeter. To know such a place, to love such a place, is part of being human. Sometimes it's a place of myth, like the Garden of Eden. Sometimes it exists in fictional form, like Narnia or Shangri-La. Sometimes it comes in memories of a golden day in childhood, or in a glorious, doomed love affair. Sometimes it's a real place that we daren't go back to, for fear that it – or we – had changed. And just occasionally it's a real place. A place where you leave a small piece of y...
As seen on PBS's American Spring Live, one of America's great nature-writers explores the magic and science of feathers Feathers are an evolutionary marvel: aerodynamic, insulating, beguiling. They date back more than 100 million years. Yet their story has never been fully told. In Feathers, biologist Thor Hanson details a sweeping natural history, as feathers have been used to fly, protect, attract, and adorn through time and place. Applying the research of paleontologists, ornithologists, biologists, engineers, and even art historians, Hanson asks: What are feathers? How did they evolve? What do they mean to us? Engineers call feathers the most efficient insulating material ever discovered, and they are at the root of biology's most enduring debate. They silence the flight of owls and keep penguins dry below the ice. They have decorated queens, jesters, and priests. And they have inked documents from the Constitution to the novels of Jane Austen. Feathers is a captivating and beautiful exploration of this most enchanting object.
Teddington is a man on the make and, after inadvertently delivering a busload of opposition politicians to Harare's chief psychiatric facility, he is rewarded with a farm by top war veteran Hitler Jesus. Not far away at The William Westward Children's Home, the director and his ginger-haired sidekick struggle to feed and clothe the multitude of orphans until they chance upon, of all things, a moth exporting business. When Teddington's farm can no longer support his spiralling ambitions, he turns his attentions to the well-run and now prosperous orphanage. Enter bogus goblin-catcher and con-man extraordinaire Cuthbert Kambazuma. Does he have the power to keep Teddington and the Green Bombers at bay, or will the orphanage fall into their rapacious hands? Chris Wadman has written a novel of startling originality. In the best tradition of political satire, he combines humour and tragedy, and introduces a cast of characters that run riot across the near lunacy of the Zimbabwean landscape.
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