- Hardcover: 156 pages
- Publisher: BBC Books (14 Feb 2002)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0563534249
- ISBN-13: 978-0563534242
- Product Dimensions: 27.7 x 22.1 x 2.3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 939,411 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Buy this book for the pictures. The BBC's series Weird Nature is a stunning entertainment, but very fast-moving. You can, and will, take more time over the photography in this coffee-table companion.
"Entertainment" is very much the key word here: John Downer has gathered together a cabinet of natural curiosities to delight, horrify and fascinate a broad audience. The material is arranged into the usual categories: breeding, feeding, fighting and the rest. The final chapter, on the uses animals make of drugs, herbs and perfumes, is more unusual, and it best points up the serious point on which this frothy and fantastic entertainment rests. We think animals "weird" when they behave in ways very different to us. But animals whose behaviour is all-too-familiar can seem even more bizarre.
This seeming contradiction has no basis in nature. Rather, it's an artefact of our anthropomorphism--our tendency to read human thoughts and emotions into the behaviour of other animals. Instead of dismissing our anthropomorphism as a rather childish "mistake", Downer argues that "the similarity between our behaviour and that of the rest of the animal kingdom is more than mere coincidence". Because we are animals ourselves, we cannot shed our own natures and look at nature "objectively", however much we would like to. We have to factor in our own reactions: indeed we can learn from them. "As we consider what defines Weird Nature, we in some way define ourselves." It's an interesting argument, only briefly sketched here. More, please! --Simon Ings
Product Description
Weird Nature brings readers a completely new experience of natural history. Written by the author and producer of Supersense and Supernatural, John Downer, it is an astonishing exploration of nature's strangest behaviour. Weird Nature takes us on a journey into a surprising and magical natural world inhabited by animals with real characters, distinct personalities, and the oddest of behaviours. Welcome to the world of flattened snakes, flying fish and otters making snow-slides. From social interactions and feeding techniques, to home-building and devious defences, Weird Nature reveals the extraordinary array of different ways of behaving. From the fantastic ways nature has devised for finding food, including worms that eat themselves and dolphins that use sponges to protect their beaks when feeding in the sand, to the animal architects that create an assortment of bizarre buildings Weird Nature explores the most fantastic and unusual natural behaviours in the animal world.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
John Downer’s book of the acclaimed BBC documentary series, Weird Nature, is little more than a summarised supplement to its televisual namesake. While it’s informative pages offer many weird and wonderful facts about the glory of nature’s little critters, it fails to deliver the detail and obscurity that the series achieved so brilliantly.
It is laid out in six simple sections Marvellous Motion, Devious Defences, Bizarre Breeding, Fantastic Feeding, Puzzling Partners & Peculiar Potions. This makes the book easy to pick up and flick through rather than having to read it from start to finish. It's layout is easy to follow with about 50% text and 50% pictures. However, it seems as though the photos have been imported directly from the TV footage as they are not as high resolution as you would expect from a glossy nature book.
This is a great coffee table book that will remind people of the original approach to nature documenting that the series boasted but sadly it lacks the one thing we all wanted from it, a close up of the female praying mantis eating the head of her male lover.
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