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Free gifts during today’s launch include a video produced by the Lincoln Center for Ethics in Global Management and Thunderbird for Good discussing the importance
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Peacocks and peahens prance about the Ranthambore National Forest enjoying the food found in the scrub especially near the lakes. Only a tiny hint of the splendid terracotta underfeathers from the side (see pics at bottom for a view of the magnificent plumage).

A bird cools his feet in the in the shallow edged of the lake. His famous tail feathers are tightly folded behind him, disguising its size and splendour.

By Ron House

As a child I was terrified of 'bugs' in general, but I came to an accommodation with spiders when, some years ago, I found that outside our house were lots of redback spiders. I started looking closely at them, and I soon found myself intrigued. They are not aggressive spiders, not at all, but if you lightly touch their back legs, faster than the eye can see they extract from their spinerets and hold out in defence a small glistening white 'net'.

But in doing so they looked to me more threatened than threatening, and I understood why redbacks don't willy nilly make trouble with humans. From then on I have let the redbacks go about their business without interference.

But it took me many years to discover that one insight into spider life. The Private Life of Spiders gave me so many more thought- and emotion-provoking insights in a few hours of enjoyable reading and viewing.

I say "viewing" because of the remarkable photographs. The pages are a colour-filled wonderland.  All the images in this post are from the book courtesy Princeton University Press.

We have webs, like frosting on the morning grass glistening with dew; spiders in riotous extremes of colour, like the translucent red, green and yellow Orchard Spider; spiders on colourful flowers; and more. And every single image is a top example of photographic skill.

Renowned for its tigers Ranthambore National Park is also a haven for birds. I had read about woodpeckers as a child in storybooks and imagined this was a bird that lived in the U.K., Europe and the U.S.A. 

By Peter Richards from Long Grass Wiildlife Refuge and Bats Qld

In previous years Gabi and I have had microbats come in to care and those that did we had little success with. We became quite somewhat despondent about the prospect of rearing more microbats only for them to die after a couple of weeks. This year however has been different. Since the beginning of December 2011 we took 9 microbats into care and lost two of them. One of the deaths was pretty well unavoidable. A bat that was passed on to us from Australia Zoo as simply requiring a rest before being released turned out to be paralysed and had multiple injuries. The second death was a 3g furless baby that survived for 27 days and then succumbed to what I think was inhalation pneumonia after she was switched from syringe feeding to lapping as she had a habit of putting her whole nose in the milk. I will stick with syringe feeding these young ones from now on.