Winfield Public Library: Nature and Science: December 2025

Recent Releases

The Call of the Honeyguide: What Science Tells Us About How to Live Well With the Rest of Life
by Rob Dunn

The evolution of life is mainly a story of competition. But this has caused scientists to miss the cooperation between organisms happening everywhere in nature. These “mutualisms” (mutually beneficial relationships between species) occur between animals and plants of all types on every continent, and biologist Rob Dunn’s vivid descriptions enable the reader to envision the complex interdependencies in nature’s ecosystems in his “triumph of popular science” (Publishers Weekly).

Life on a Little-Known Planet: Dispatches from a Changing World
by Elizabeth Kolbert

A landmark collection of Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Kolbert's most important pieces about climate change and the natural world. An intrepid reporter and a skillful translator of scientific idees, Kolbert expertly captures the wonders of nature and paints vivid portraits of the researchers and concerned citizens working to preserve them. The threats to our planet that Kolbert has devoted so much of her career to exposing have only grown more serious. Now is the time to deepen our understanding of the world we are in danger of losing.

The Urban Naturalist: How to Make the City Your Scientific Playground
by Menno Schilthuizen

Imagine taking your smartphone-turned-microscope to an empty lot and discovering a rare mason bee that builds its nest in empty snail shells. Or a miniature spider that hunts ants and carries their corpses around. With a team of citizen scientists, that's exactly what Menno Schilthuizen did. In this delightful book, Schilthuizen invites us to join him, to embark on a new age of discovery, venturing out as intrepid explorers of our own urban habitat--and maybe in the process do the natural world some good.

Super Natural: How Life Thrives in Impossible Places
by Alex Riley

From scorching deserts to frozen seabeds, from the highest peaks of the Himalaya to the hadal depths of the oceans, there are habitats on this Earth that appear hostile to life--yet where, nevertheless, life flourishes. Super Natural shows us how, at nature's furthest limits, the rules of biology as we know them are rewritten--and how, in life's astonishing ingenuity and persistence even in the face of calamity and change, we can find hope for the future of life on Earth.

Why Rats Laugh and Jellyfish Sleep: And Other Enchanting Stories of Evolution
by David Stipp

In this lively, fun, and accessible work of popular science, Stipp ponders Darwinian puzzles about nine familiar creatures and things--bumblebees, dogs, sparrows, caffeine, earthworms, and sleep, among others--to show how rewarding it can be to look at nature in a deeper way. Readers will enjoy the way Stipp writes "with evident delight for the head-scratching bits of evolution...". (Shelf Awareness)

The Tree of Life: Solving Science's Greatest Puzzle
by Max Telford

Taking readers inside one of science's most ambitious projects, a leading evolutionary biologist offers a definitive portrait of life's family tree. Telford shows how reconstructing the web of relationships between all our planet's species, from birds and butterflies to mushrooms and moose, allows us to unravel the epic history of life on our planet. "From the first simple cell to today's variety of life forms, this is the story of us--fascinating, captivating, and complex." (Kirkus Reviews)

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