Bears Growing Up Wild

Describes different kinds of bear cubs and the changes they go through in their appearance and behavior as they grow up and become successful adult bears.

Depicts the hatching, care, growth, and education of baby Adelie penguins.

Bear cubs are super cute when they tumble and play, but this play with each other and their mothers actually teaches them how to survive on their own one day. Fun facts round out their story, and vibrant photographs show baby bears as they grow up, learning to forage, hunt, and defend themselves. Readers will learn all about the lives of bear cubs as they grow from helpless, hairless babies into adults ready to face the wild world.

There is a tremendous information gap between scientists working in the outdoor fields and the millions of others who share their interest in natural processes. The failure of naturalists to provide information to the public has allowed some amazing myths to develop. Far worse, however, this knowledge gap can bring about actual damage to the environment through laws and public policy initiatives based on erroneous information. Growing Up Wild bridges this gap, bringing the latest results of scientific research to the public in an irreverent, humorous style that would make the book worth reading for entertainment value alone. The author, who combines careers as a wildlife professional and newspaper columnist, provides an eclectic mix of topics from toads to turkeys in a style that, while always humorous, ranges from gonzo journalism to formal poetrysometimes in the same essay. Many of the essays contained in the book began life as one of the authors weekly newspaper columns. These were supposed to focus on a single organism and give some interesting facts about it. That is, they were supposed to be typical nature pieces. The questions that came in, in response to the original columns, seemed to indicate that people were not even reading all the way through. So he changed the format to start out with some outrageous tale to pique the interest (and make people wonder how on earth this was going to segue to the real topic), move on to the main topic, then hook back to the anecdote at the end. The response was quite overwhelming. Since the material in this book has a mix of early and more recent columns, the reader can watch this style develop. There is something for everyone in this collection of essays. Topics range from single-celled organisms to whales. In addition to recreational reading, this book provides excellent supplementary material for students. In spite of the humor and light tone, each essay provides an in-depth look into the lives of our wild neighbors, as well as making some pointed commentary on the culture and political processes that affect them.

What do grizzly bear cubs eat? Where do baby raccoons sleep? And how does a baby otter learn to swim? Every baby mammal, from a tiny harvest mouse "pinky" to a fierce lion cub, needs food, shelter, love, and a family. Filled with illustrations of some of the most adorable babies in the kingdom, this awww-inspiring book looks at the traits that all baby mammals share and proves that, even though they're born in the wild, they're not so very different from us, after all!

Are you bored with being so proper? Do you want to have more fun? Mr. Tiger knows exactly how you feel. So he decides to go wild. But does he go too far? From Caldecott Honor artist Peter Brown comes a story that shows there's a time and place for everything...even going wild.

After enduring a vicious bear attack in the Russian Far East's Kamchatka Peninsula, a French anthropologist undergoes a physical and spiritual transformation that forces her to confront the tenuous distinction between animal and human. In the Eye of the Wild begins with an account of the French anthropologist Nastassja Martin’s near fatal run-in with a Kamchatka bear in the mountains of Siberia. Martin’s professional interest is animism; she addresses philosophical questions about the relation of humankind to nature, and in her work she seeks to partake as fully as she can in the lives of the indigenous peoples she studies. Her violent encounter with the bear, however, brings her face-to-face with something entirely beyond her ken—the untamed, the nonhuman, the animal, the wild. In the course of that encounter something in the balance of her world shifts. A change takes place that she must somehow reckon with. Left severely mutilated, dazed with pain, Martin undergoes multiple operations in a provincial Russian hospital, while also being grilled by the secret police. Back in France, she finds herself back on the operating table, a source of new trauma. She realizes that the only thing for her to do is to return to Kamchatka. She must discover what it means to have become, as the Even people call it, medka, a person who is half human, half bear. In the Eye of the Wild is a fascinating, mind-altering book about terror, pain, endurance, and self-transformation, comparable in its intensity of perception and originality of style to J. A. Baker’s classic The Peregrine. Here Nastassja Martin takes us to the farthest limits of human being.