The Peacocks Of Palos Verdes

No one would have guessed that a thoughtful gift from one friend to another would result in colonies of semi-domestic peacocks spread out today over the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Join author Mary Jo Hazard on a journey through the area, discovering all that these colorful, attention grabbing birds have to offer.

Palos Verdes and the South Bay's dramatic beauty is mirrored by a dramatic history. Feuding over claims to the Rancho San Pedro continued for seventy-three years. The Vanderlip family's forty-year development of the Palos Verdes Peninsula resulted in one of California's wealthiest and most well-kept enclaves of coastal cities. Marineland of the Pacific on the Peninsula's end was one of the West Coast's more popular tourism draws before its controversial closing. But that's only the beginning. In this exciting compilation of articles, authors Bruce and Maureen Megowan reveal some of the intriguing secrets and little-known facts nestled within the hills, valleys and nearby cities of this beautiful area. Discover some of the fascinating stories about the development of the South Bay and Palos Verdes Peninsula.

Urban landscapes are usually thought of first and foremost as engineered formations designed for functionality. It is quite clear, however, that cities and towns are sites of social structure, scenes of diversity, and hotbeds of transgressions. They are also sources of satisfying social relationships, settings for actions negotiated on an everyday basis, and opportunities for kinesthetic and aesthetic experiences. Within these processes, the senses mediate engagement with the optimism of urban growth, the comfort of urban traditions, and a consciousness of the diverse relationships that embellish urban living, but also with the repellent sights and sounds that invade zones of comfort. This book examines how qualities of place and their sensuous reorganisation elucidate particular sociocultural expressions and practices in urban life. The collection illuminates how urban environments are distinguished, valued, or reconfigured with the senses as media for evaluating authentic spaces and places that endure and change over time.

Until Flynn’s neighbor in North Carolina offered him one, he had never considered whether he wanted a peacock. His family became the owners of not one but three charming yet fickle birds: Carl, Ethel, and Mr. Pickle. Here he chronicles their first year as peacock owners, from struggling to build a pen to assisting the local bird doctor in surgery to triumphantly watching a peahen lay her first egg. He also examines the history of peacocks, from their appearance in the Garden of Eden. And Flynn travels across the globe to learn more about the birds firsthand. His book offers surprising lessons about love, grief, fatherhood, and family. -- adapted from jacket.

Follows the adventures of Palo, a young peachick, who learns an important lesson when he and his sisters are attacked by a wild coyote.

Joy Nicholson's The Tribes of Palos Verdes is a Los Angeles Times bestseller and now a major motion picture starring Jennifer Garner, Maika Monroe, and Cody Fern. “Nicholson captures the California-coast culture. . . . Medina shows what it’s like to feel ‘six million years old’ way before your time."—Entertainment Weekly “Impressive . . . Captures what it is to be young, intelligent, and very alone.”—Us Weekly Medina Mason is a defiant, awkward fourteen-year-old living in the affluent beach community of Palos Verdes, California. The pressure is intense in their high-stakes world, and Medina’s family begins to break under the stress. Her parents’ marriage disintegrates and her beloved brother turns to drugs in order to cope. Medina turns to the ocean to escape it all. She surfs to survive, finding a bitter solace in the rough comfort of the waves. “An inspiring portrait of a young woman unswayed by other people’s pettiness” (Mademoiselle), this is the moving story of growing up “different,” of the love between siblings, and of one girl’s power to save herself

Echoes of Ocean Trails provides an interesting perspective of the local history of Palos Verdes while keeping the reader?s attention on the lives of Michael and John, two ordinary high school students who stumble onto a quest. They have no idea what they discover until each detailed historical count leads them towards the untold legend of Ocean Trails. While recounting the history of Palos Verdes, Michael and John are forced to maintain their daily routines at home and in school in order to continue searching for the facts; facts that will change their lives and possibly the future their parents had planned for them. Echoes of Ocean Trails will not only intrigue you to visit Portuguese Bend and Palos Verdes, California but also make you wonder about its true saga!

This groundbreaking work of both theoretical and experiential thought by two leading ecological philosophers and animal liberation scientists ventures into a new frontier of applied ethical anthrozoological studies. Through lean and elegant text, readers will learn that human interconnections with other species and ecosystems are severely endangered precisely because we lack - by our evolutionary self-confidence - the very coherence that is everywhere around us abundantly demonstrated. What our species has deemed to be superior is, according to Tobias and Morrison, the cumulative result of a tragically tenuous argument predicated on the brink of our species’ self-destruction, giving rise to a most unique proposition: We either recognize the miracle of other sentient intelligence, sophistication, and genius, or risk enshrining the shortest lived epitaph of any known vertebrate in earth’s 4.1 billion years of life. Tobias and Morrison draw on 45 years of research in fields ranging from ecological anthropology, animal protection and comparative ethics to literature and spirituality - and beyond. They deploy research in animal and plant behavior, biocultural heritage contexts from every continent and they bring to bear a deeply metaphysical array of perspectives that set this book apart from any other. The book departs from most work in such fields as animal rights, ecological aesthetics, comparative ethology or traditional animal and plant behaviorist work, and yet it speaks to readers with an interest in those fields. A deeply provocative book of philosophical premises and hypotheses from two of the world’s most influential ecological philosophers, this text is likely to stir uneasiness and debate for many decades to come.