In this beautiful story of kindness and empathy, loneliness and love, one creature finds that the help he needs is just a song and a sigh away. Now available as a board book--a perfect new baby gift! Whale's beautiful song winds its way through the ocean, reaching the farthest of faraways. His song is one of happiness and hope, magic and wonder--and Whale's fellow sea creatures are calmed, cheered, and lulled by it. But though Whale sings his tender song day after day, night after night, he wonders why he has no song to fill his empty heart. So when he lets out a mournful sigh, the ocean carries it like a wish through its fathoms, bringing it to just the right place. Filled with stunning art and poetic text, this poignant story reminds us that being kind and helping a friend in need are sometimes the most beautiful things of all.
WELCOME HOME is the story of a young boy and a whale as she swims into the river harbor seeking safety and a resolution to the violent past relationship between whales and man. This prosaic journey, accompanied with soft sketchy watercolour images, reveals how the past can impact our future. Can the boy make amends for the past? Can the whale forgive and return to what was once her ancestor's home.
Abigail dreads swimming lessons because all the kids yell, "Abigail is a whale", when she jumps into the pool. But when her swimming teacher suggests that she needs to think light in order to swim well, things begin to turn around. And soon Abigail starts thinking about a lot of things.
Everybody Out of the Pond At the Water's Edge will change the way you think about your place in the world. The awesome journey of life's transformation from the first microbes 4 billion years ago to Homo sapiens today is an epic that we are only now beginning to grasp. Magnificent and bizarre, it is the story of how we got here, what we left behind, and what we brought with us. We all know about evolution, but it still seems absurd that our ancestors were fish. Darwin's idea of natural selection was the key to solving generation-to-generation evolution -- microevolution -- but it could only point us toward a complete explanation, still to come, of the engines of macroevolution, the transformation of body shapes across millions of years. Now, drawing on the latest fossil discoveries and breakthrough scientific analysis, Carl Zimmer reveals how macroevolution works. Escorting us along the trail of discovery up to the current dramatic research in paleontology, ecology, genetics, and embryology, Zimmer shows how scientists today are unveiling the secrets of life that biologists struggled with two centuries ago. In this book, you will find a dazzling, brash literary talent and a rigorous scientific sensibility gracefully brought together. Carl Zimmer provides a comprehensive, lucid, and authoritative answer to the mystery of how nature actually made itself.
Winner of the 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction * Finalist for the 2020 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction * Finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award A “delving, haunted, and poetic debut” (The New York Times Book Review) about the awe-inspiring lives of whales, revealing what they can teach us about ourselves, our planet, and our relationship with other species. When writer Rebecca Giggs encountered a humpback whale stranded on her local beachfront in Australia, she began to wonder how the lives of whales reflect the condition of our oceans. Fathoms: The World in the Whale is “a work of bright and careful genius” (Robert Moor, New York Times bestselling author of On Trails), one that blends natural history, philosophy, and science to explore: How do whales experience ecological change? How has whale culture been both understood and changed by human technology? What can observing whales teach us about the complexity, splendor, and fragility of life on earth? In Fathoms, we learn about whales so rare they have never been named, whale songs that sweep across hemispheres in annual waves of popularity, and whales that have modified the chemical composition of our planet’s atmosphere. We travel to Japan to board the ships that hunt whales and delve into the deepest seas to discover how plastic pollution pervades our earth’s undersea environment. With the immediacy of Rachel Carson and the lush prose of Annie Dillard, Giggs gives us a “masterly” (The New Yorker) exploration of the natural world even as she addresses what it means to write about nature at a time of environmental crisis. With depth and clarity, she outlines the challenges we face as we attempt to understand the perspectives of other living beings, and our own place on an evolving planet. Evocative and inspiring, Fathoms “immediately earns its place in the pantheon of classics of the new golden age of environmental writing” (Literary Hub).
DIVPhotographer and conservationist Bryant Austin’s breathtaking photographic project Beautiful Whale is the first of its kind: It chronicles his fearless attempts to reach out to whales as fellow sentient beings. Featuring Austin’s intimate images—some as detailed as a single haunting eye—that result from encounters based on mutual trust, Beautiful Whale captures the grace and intelligence of these magnificent creatures. Austin spent days at a time submerged, motionless, in the waters of remote spawning grounds waiting for humpback, sperm, and minke whales to seek him out. As oceanographer Sylvia A. Earle says in her foreword to the book, “As an ambassador from the ocean—and to the ocean—Bryant Austin is not only a source of inspiration. He is cause for hope.†? Praise for Beautiful Whale: “You can’t help thinking, with every passing page, that this is what’s it’s like to swim with the whales.†? —The Wall Street Journal /div
Teaches young readers everything they need to know about the largest mammals on earth: how they have evolved over millions of years, what and how they eat, their migration patterns, and more.
A compendium of straightforward techniques on how to accentuate the positive and redirect the negative, increasing productivity at work and at home. What do your people at work and your spouse and kids at home have in common with a five-ton killer whale? Probably a whole lot more than you think, according to top business consultant and mega-bestselling author Ken Blanchard and his coauthors from SeaWorld. In this moving and inspirational new book, Blanchard explains that both whales and people perform better when you accentuate the positive. He shows how using the techniques of animal trainers -- specifically those responsible for the killer whales of SeaWorld -- can supercharge your effectiveness at work and at home. When gruff business manager and family man Wes Kingsley visited SeaWorld, he marveled at the ability of the trainers to get these huge killer whales, among the most feared predators in the ocean, to perform amazing acrobatic leaps and dives. Later, talking to the chief trainer, he learned their techniques of building trust, accentuating the positive, and redirecting negative behavior -- all of which make these extraordinary performances possible. Kingsley took a hard look at his own often accusatory management style and recognized how some of his shortcomings as a manager, spouse, and father actually diminish trust and damage relationships. He began to see the difference between "GOTcha" (catching people doing things wrong) and "Whale Done!" (catching people doing things right). In Whale Done!, Ken Blanchard shows how to make accentuating the positive and redirecting the negative the best tools to increase productivity, instead of creating situations that demoralize people. These techniques are remarkably easy to master and can be applied equally well at home, allowing readers to become better parents and more committed spouses in their happier and more successful personal lives.
This book is about Salt, the most famous humpback whale that lives and feeds in the waters off Cape Cod. Through the eyes of Salt, readers learn about the biology of humpback whales and the other baleen whales that come to feed in the waters of New England. Salt is a baleen whale that filters over 1 ton of large krill or small baitfish out of the water each day. This book describes how baleen, made from a protein called keratin, grows down from the gum line of the upper jaw and creates a hairy mat inside the whale's mouth. As a whale lunges mouth open, engulfing seawater and small baitfish, the whale will then close its mouth and begin to strain or push the water back out. Saltwater can pass through the hairy mat inside the mouth, but the fish become trapped inside. Next the whale swallows its food whole. Readers also learn about Salt's life and her 13 calves. Each have received a name in honor of their famous mom. By watching Salt and her offspring, scientists have learned that humpback moms have a single calf every few years. The calf stays with mom for a year, but it will return to the same feeding area when a juvenile and then as an adult. Also discussed are current research techniques being conducted on humpback whales. Much of the research is focused on a benign technique called photo-identification, where natural body markings and features are photographed and used to create catalogs of known individuals. Known individual humpbacks are then tracked over the course of a season or from one season to the next. Readers also learn about the many hazards facing our oceans and all marine wildlife that call the ocean home. Marine hazards include, overfishing, climate change, marine debris, and collisions with vessels. Positive actions that people can take to help protect the oceans, whales, and all marine animals includes, reducing, reusing, and recycling, as well as reading about marine wildlife and participating in conservation activities like beach cleanups.