A baby ape swinging under the table, a kangaroo in the supermarket, a deadly insect bite. Geoff Read, head zoo-keeper for over forty years tells his story. This book gives us a true snapshot of what zoo life is like.
Up on the highway, the only evidence that the Chamberlains had ever been there was two smeared tire tracks in the mud leading into an almost undamaged screen of bushes and trees. No other cars passed that way until after dawn. By that time the tracks had been washed away by the heavy rain. After being in New Zealand for only five days, the English Chamberlain family had vanished into thin air. The date was 4 April 1978. In 2010 the remains of the eldest Chamberlain child are discovered in a remote part of the West Coast, showing he lived for four years after the family disappeared. Found alongside him are his father’s watch and what turns out to be a tally stick, a piece of scored wood marking items of debt. How had he survived and then died? Where is the rest of the family? And what is the meaning of the tally stick?
Frances Jellico is dying. A man who calls himself the vicar visits, hoping to extract a deathbed confession. He wants to know what really happened that fateful summer of 1969, when Frances – tasked with surveying a dilapidated country house – first set eyes on the glamorous bohemian couple, Cara and Peter. She recalls the relationship they forged through sweltering days, lavish dinners, and elaborate lies, and the Judas hole through which she would spy on the couple. Were the signs there right from the beginning? Or was it impossible to avoid the crime that split their lives open like rotten fruit?
It is 1966 and 12 year old Mary Foster’s narrow, prescribed world is abruptly disturbed by a sudden, unexplained move from suburban London to a neglected Victorian house on the south coast of England.
A ten year study of a one kilometre stretch of the River Itchen at Martyr Worthy, Hampshire – one of the finest wild brown trout rivers in the world. This highly illustrated account of the wildlife (birds, plants, insects, animals, fish, reptiles, snails) and riverkeeping and river engineering activities gives an insight into life on the river through the seasons and across the years. Underwater and night vision images reveal hidden life and features. Historical detail, combined with contemporary accounts and aerial mapping, bring the past back into focus. Conservation is discussed. ‘Art in Nature’ is featured to engage with children, artists, poets and story-tellers. Fieldcraft, equipment and techniques are also described.
1976: Peggy Hillcoat is eight. She spends her summer camping with her father, playing her beloved record of ‘The Railway Children’ and listening to her mother’s grand piano, but her pretty life is about to change. Her survivalist father, who has been stockpiling provisions for the end which is surely coming soon, takes her from London to a cabin in a remote European forest. There he tells Peggy the rest of the world has disappeared. Her life is reduced to a piano which makes music but no sound, a forest where all that grows is a means of survival. And a tiny wooden hut that is everything. She is not seen again for another nine years.