Welcome to Litsy!

#Naturalitsy

This fantastic book has been published in the US this week, under the title Vanishing Treasures. The author is donating 💯 author royalties, in perpetuity, to climate change charities.
I highly recommend it and it makes for a beautiful gift. Go buy multiple copies. 😊
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/13/author-katherine-rundell-donates-r...

I've had this a little while on my wishlist, but had only seen the hardback and wanted the paperback, which I found today, and with the (admittedly-largely-unnecessary-due-to-lack-of-impulse-control) prompt of @AnneCecilie 's recent intriguing posts, I acquired it, along with these charming vinyl stickers, the cat one being for my niece, the other being for myself, though I'm not sure where to stick it (suggestions not required!).

This book is amazing. Randell focuses on several animals that might be extinct if nothing changes. There‘s just so many fun facts and despite everything I posted, there‘s so much more interesting information as well.

Spider silk weighs almost nothing - a thread of silk long enough to loop the Earth would weigh less than five hundred grams - but is one of the strongest materials on the planet: five times stronger than a strand of steel of the same thickness. […] If we were to make a vast web of spider‘s silk as thick as a biro, it would halt a Boing 747 mid-air.

Coming across the bones of their dead, they will salute them, lightly touching the skulls and tusks with their trunks and vest, heavy feet. They have been known to bury dead members of their herd, covering them in earth and leaves.

At the Puy du Fou theme park in France, six particularly intelligent midnight-blue rooks - members of the crow family - have been trained to pick up litter. They drop cigarette ends in a box, which releases a small piece of food, while the people who dropped the butt look on. Image it: being publicly shamed by a rook.

A question children like to ask: who would win in a fight, man or bear? It depends on the day. There are about forty attacks by bears reported globally per year, but fewer than twenty per cent of them are fatal. (Far, far fewer than the number of people killed yearly by falling televisions, faulty lawn mowers or toppling vending machines.)

When a crab comes across a new shell, it will climb into it and try it on for size. If the shell is of good quality but too big, it waits nearby for another crab to come and inspect it. If that crab also finds it too large, it joins the first crab, holding onto its claw until a queue develops - it can stretch to twenty crabs, arranged in order of size from smallest to largest, each holding onto the next: a hermit crab chorus line. When at last a

“We know that to prepare for their great flight, the young chicks in the nest strength their wings from a month old by doing feathery press-ups;”

“A swift flies about 200.000 kilometers a year; the Earth has a circumference at the equator of 40.075 kilometers;”

“it separated off from other birds about seventy million years ago, so they‘re old enough as a species to have had a nodding acquaintance with the Tyrannosaurs.

#WeeklyForecast

Continue the buddy reads, Run Towards the Danger #SheSaid and Dissolution #ShardlakeBR

I want to finish Matrescence

I‘m about to start 8 Lives of a Century-Old-Trickster and The Golden Mole, and I want to finish 8 Lives

I hope to maybe get a start on Marking Time as well

A very late edition to my top 10 of 2023 🙌🏼🙌🏼🙌🏼

Not only is book full of amazing stories of amazing creatures it‘s illustrated with a lightness that is just gorgeous. Did I mention this is a great book! 😃

Such a beautiful book. Micro chapters celebrating the joy and wonder of some of the earths most sophisticated, complex and jaw dropping amazing creatures that are on the verge of distinction. I think this is a book I‘m going to buy over & over and give to everyone!

#midwintersolace
A collection of short stories about animals from around the world. I‘m not normally a fan of non-fiction but this has opened my eyes to what amazing and mysterious animals we are lucky enough to share the planet with.
#naturallitsy

#Bookhaul

Forgot to post over the weekend. Santa has been very good to me this year! 😍🎅😍

This is on the shortlist for Waterstones book of the year, and was available on BorrowBox so I thought I‘d try it. Short essays, each accompanied by a beautiful sketch, tell of weird and wonderful creatures that are in danger due to the impact of humans. Some animals are familiar, some not but I learned a lot from this delightful book.

I have to say, though, I loved the stinky lemurs the most. This would make a lovely gift (for kids or adults)

All of us have clicked and 💕photos & videos of funny or cute animals on social media. Have we given a thought to how rare, so miraculously wonderful, and how we are so dangerously close to losing them? Brilliantly written profiles of selected animals, birds, fish, insects which, for me at any rate, were eye opening; making me curious and angry at the damage we have wrought. The author makes a case for what can possibly help: to be attentive