55 books
Lawrence R. Walker and Frederick H. Landau
This is the only modern natural history of the Mojave, which makes it the standard by default, but it’s also thorough, engaging, and well-written. There’s the geology and how the basins and ranges got there, climate and why so little…
Aldo Leopold
You know it from “land ethic,” but you’ll remember it for his incredible observations of nature. Aldo Leopold was a forester who spent his early career killing predators for the government, then changed his mind, and this book is the…
Cormac McCarthy
John Grady Cole is sixteen when his grandfather dies and the ranch he expected to inherit gets sold out from under him. It’s 1949, and the cowboy life he wants has already ended in Texas, so he and a friend…
Ed Yong
An Immense World delivers miracles on every page. A fly’s vision updates six times faster than a human’s, perhaps rending its perception of our movements in slow motion. Cows’ gazes appear unfocused because they see in a horizontal band and…
Barry Lopez
Barry Lopez spent five years going north — on the ice with Inuit and Iñupiat hunters, on ships, in camps with biologists — and came back with the book that made his name. It won the National Book Award in…
David Abram
David Abram put himself through school doing card tricks, which is how he ended up hanging around traditional healers in Indonesia and Nepal. He figured they’d talk shop about magic. Instead he found their real work wasn’t with people at…
David Rains Wallace
Here’s the riddle: Nobody can say how old the California desert actually is, or where its plants and animals came from. Creosote, ocotillo, cactus, the chuckwalla itself — did they evolve out there over tens of millions of years, or…
Dan Flores
Wolves got wiped out of the Lower 48. Coyotes got the same treatment — bounties, poison, a federal agency that killed millions of them for the better part of a century — and instead of dying off they spread into…
Raymond B. Cowles
Raymond Cowles grew up in South Africa, studied at UCLA, and more or less invented the study of how cold-blooded animals manage their own body heat — the reason we know a lizard moves between sun and shade to hold…
Edmund C. Jaeger
In 1946, Edmund Jaeger was poking around a canyon in the Chuckwalla Mountains when he found a poorwill wedged in a rock crevice, cold and unresponsive, and it stayed that way for weeks. Nobody thought birds could hibernate. He went…
Ellen Meloy
Meloy lived on the San Juan River in Southeast Utah and spent four seasons watching a band of about eighty desert bighorn on the cliffs near her house — sheep she called the Blue Door Band. They’d been written off…
Paul Yoon
The narrator is a dog. Etna is a working military dog in an unnamed country, and after years at war he walks away from the men he fought beside one night and heads for the place he was taken from…
Rebecca Giggs
Rebecca Giggs helped push a beached humpback back into the water off a Perth beach. It came back and she stood with the crowd while it died. What stayed with her was the question, what happens to a whale that…
George Saunders
A fox teaches himself human by lurking under a window while a mother reads bedtime stories, so the whole thing comes at you in his spelling — Yuman, storys, grate. Then a mall goes up over the woods. The food…
Doug Peacock
Peacock came home from Vietnam a Green Beret medic who couldn’t be around people, drove into the Montana and Wyoming backcountry, and started following grizzlies. No gun, just a camera and years of sitting still watching bears he came to…
Helen Macdonald
A goshawk is the falconer’s hard case — bigger, faster, and less forgiving than a falcon, with a reputation for being impossible to keep steady. Macdonald had been a falconer since childhood and she bought one in Scotland for £800,…
Ryan Huling
The premise is a line from American naturalist Henry Beston: Animals aren’t underlings, they’re other nations. Huling takes it literally and spends a year mapping their territories — Canada’s beaver belt, the tunnel complexes of sub-Saharan mole-rats, prairie dog cities…
Tristan Gooley
The short, gentle one in Gooley’s run of “how to nature” books — an introduction rather than a manual, aimed at getting the senses back open. Fifteen short exercises, most taking a few minutes: Listen for the shape of a…
Peter Kuper
A little context: Homo sapiens have been around for a few hundred thousand years. Insects? Four hundred million years. In this beautifully rendered, graphic-novel-style accounting of the natural history of bugs, artist Peter Kuper notes insects are perfectly happy without…
Peter Godfrey-Smith
Third in the run that started with Other Minds, and this one widens out from mind to the whole planet. His subject is action — how living things don’t just experience the world but reshape it, from bacteria oxygenating the…
Peter Godfrey-Smith
If Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds was the octopus, this is everybody else. He works up the animal tree looking for where experience begins — sponges with no neurons at all, then corals, then a shrimp that stuns prey with a snap,…
Charlotte McConaghy
Franny Stone talks her way onto a fishing boat in Greenland by promising the crew that the Arctic terns she has tagged will lead them to the last fish in a mostly emptied ocean. The birds are making what may…
James L. Gould; Carol Grant Gould
Animals navigate better than they should be able to and we still can’t fully explain it. The authors track through the evidence: Bees using polarized light and dancing directions to a hive, monarchs three generations removed finding one Mexican forest,…
David Liittschwager
My Octopus Teacher might have alerted us to the idea of a novel alien intelligence beneath the waves, but nothing can prepare you for the profound diversity and unconventional beauty of octopuses, seahorses, and jellyfish seen through the lens of…
Peter Godfrey-Smith
Our last common ancestor with an octopus was a flattened worm about six hundred million years back, which makes them the closest thing to meeting an intelligent alien on this planet. Godfrey-Smith is a philosopher and a scuba diver, and…
Annie Dillard
Annie Dillard was in her twenties, living beside a creek in Virginia’s Blue Ridge, when she spent a year writing what she saw there — muskrats, a mantis laying eggs, a frog that a giant water bug drains to a…
James Rebanks
Rebanks, the Lake District shepherd who wrote The Shepherd’s Life, went to a bare island off the coast of northern Norway for a season to work with a woman named Anna in her seventies — one of the last of…
Richard Powers
Four lives converging on Makatea, a French Polynesian island strip-mined for phosphate decades ago and now down to eighty residents who are being asked to vote on whether a consortium can build the first floating city offshore. There’s a tech…
Perrin Roosevelt Ireland
Sex sells, even animal sex, and Perrin Roosevelt Ireland has made a career as a science educator by focusing on the squirts, wriggles, and wee thumps of the faunal world. Known on social media for her short dispatches on creature…
Chloe Dalton
Dalton was a foreign policy adviser in Westminster, stranded at a country house during lockdown, when she found a newborn leveret alone on a track. Hares aren’t domesticable — they’ve never been tamed, they die of stress in captivity, and…
Terry Tempest Williams
Two things happen at once. The Great Salt Lake rises to record levels through the mid-eighties and drowns the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, where Williams has watched birds her whole life. And her mother is dying of ovarian cancer,…
Seth Kantner
Kantner was born in a sod igloo on the Kobuk River to homesteading parents and grew up hunting and trapping among Iñupiaq neighbors in northwest Alaska. This is memoir in photographs and short essays — his father’s pictures and his…
Rachel Carson
Carson was already a bestselling nature writer when she turned her attention to pesticides, and she was dying of cancer while she finished this. The opening is a fable — a town where the birds have gone quiet — and…
Alex Riley
Some critters will go a long way for a little privacy. Ten years after the Chernobyl nuclear accident, thirty-seven forms of fungi were found growing inside the abandoned reactor, some of them thriving; this led microbiologist Nelli Zhdanova and colleagues…
Seth Kantner
Kantner’s collected dispatches — columns, essays, and reportage from northwest Alaska written over a couple of decades. Wolves and caribou and the biologists counting them, the economics of a village where a gallon of gas costs what it does, snow…
Amy Tan
Amy Tan started drawing birds in 2016 and kept a nature journal for six years, and this is a facsimile of it — her ink and watercolor drawings with her handwritten notes running around them. The Northern flicker, the scrub…
Andrew Krivak
Off in the future, society has collapsed, leaving behind only a girl and her father as the last people on the planet. They live in an idyllic setting, the stuff of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dreams: a mountainside cabin near a…
Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris
Forty-nine British birds, every one of them in decline, from avocet to yellowhammer. Macfarlane writes each as a short essay rather than an identification entry — habits, flight, song, myth, and threat — and he varies the form wildly, including…
Patrik Svensson
Who knew there could be an international bestseller all about eels? Turns out, as Patrik Svensson writes, quite a few knew. Centuries of leading thinkers — Pliny the Elder, Aristotle, Sigmund Freud, Rachel Carson — have been captivated by eels…
Edmund C. Jaeger
Jaeger’s 1933 guide, and for decades it was the only real one: geology, water, weather, plants, animals, and the routes across the Mojave and the Colorado, written by a man who walked it for sixty years and taught at Riverside.…
Cormac McCarthy
The second McCarthy border novel — a young man crosses into Mexico to return a wolf to the wild. The wolf doesn’t survive. Neither does the old world McCarthy is eulogizing. If McCarthy’s your jam, the prose is as good…
Jennifer Ackerman
Birdbrain is a slur for which we should apologize to our feathered friends. Ackerman goes out with researchers and comes back with the feats birds pull off. New Caledonian crows manufacture hooked tools out of twigs and keep the good…
Chi Zijian
A ninety-year-old Evenki woman, wife of this northern China clan’s last chieftain, tells the story of a century of her reindeer-herding people’s life to “the rain and the fire” over the course of a single day, as the last of…
Peter Heller
Ren Hopper is a park ranger in Yellowstone, still grieving the death of his wife, and his job is mostly managing tourists who get too close to the animals. His friend Hilly is a wolf biologist whom the anti-wolf faction…
Lars Chittka
Chittka has spent his career designing experiments for bees, with astounding results. Bees count. They recognize human faces. They learn to roll a ball into a goal for a sugar reward by watching another bee do it, then improve on…
Joseph Wood Krutch
Krutch was a New York drama critic and Thoreau scholar who moved to Tucson in his fifties and became one of the great desert writers. This is his naturalist’s year: The spadefoot toad that waits underground for the one right…
Rosalie Haizlett
With luck, Tiny Worlds will trigger FOMO—and point you toward the miraculous web of beauty seen at foot level and strolling speed. Plagued by chronic migraines as a teenager, West Virginia watercolorist Rosalie Haizlett started taking long walks in nature…
David
Longtime National Geographic photographer David Doubilet has spent more than twenty-seven thousand hours underwater, often in pursuit of the images that have become synonymous with his name: over/unders, above and belows, or, as he calls them, half-and-halfs. Enabled by domed…
Daniel Kraus
Jay Gardiner is seventeen and diving alone off the California coast to recover his father’s remains — the father was a legendary diver who walked into the ocean to die of cancer, and the two of them had said unforgivable…
Jennifer Ackerman
Owls are hard to study — night, silence, no interest in being watched — so most of what people believed about them was folklore. Ackerman goes out with the researchers finally cracking it. Feathers with a comb on the leading…
David Allen Sibley
Sibley drew the definitive field guides, and this is the opposite of a field guide: A big book of large paintings with the answers to the questions people actually ask. Why do birds stand on one leg. How they sleep…
Dan Flores
This is sixty-six million years of American animals in one book. Flores starts after the asteroid that killed the dinos and works forward — the strange menagerie that evolved, then the arrival of humans and the extinction of mammoths, horses,…
Li Juan
“Later, when I found myself hoisting thirty pounds of snow, tottering across the desert huffing and puffing like an ox, I couldn’t help but sigh: bad idea.” So notes eighty-eight-pound Li Juan in her surprisingly humorous memoir about a winter…
Taylor Brown
Trace Temple’s family lost their New Mexico ranch after somebody shot an endangered wolf, and now he’s living out of his truck, broke and pissed at the government. A secretive militia offers him money to kill One-Eleven, the she-wolf leading…
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
These are bite-sized essays, one animal or plant each, illustrated by Fumi Nakamura. Nezhukumatathil is a poet, and each piece runs the natural history alongside her own life — Indian and Filipino parents, a childhood moving between Arizona, Kansas, and…
