(Review) A Grab Bag of Science Titles

Life has become so topsy turvy the past few months that I keep devouring titles without taking (making?) the time to write about them. While it’s satisyfing to see my stack of completed reading grow higher, it’s also a constant reminder that this working mother of a two-year-old tyrant doesn’t have enough time to write thoughtful, deep reviews of each. As an author myself, I know how much time, effort, and middle-of-the-night anxiety attacks is channeled into creating a published book, so I feel an obligation of sorts — throbbing with a deep vein of empathy — to give the following books praise and recognition.

To get through the lastet tomes, this post will do something new. Instead of writing an in-depth review for each, I’ve summarized the works in a few paragraphs. I’ve tried to keep things simple and sweet. Enjoy! Hopefully you’ll find some science reading inspiration for your New Year!

Relicts of A Beautiful Sea: Survival, Extinction, and Conservation in a Desert World

Relicts Of A Beautiful Sea, by Christopher Norment

This is a beautiful, sensitive, and intellectual book about the fragility of water-bound desert species in the Inyo Mountains of Death Valley. The illustrations and cover make it aesthetic enough to be mistaken for a decorative coffee-table book, but this work is filled with detailed and poignant insight from a working biologist who observes the land and its inhabitants with a poet’s sensibilities. Author Christopher Norment easily imparts facts and knowledge of the desert environs and its most precarious inhabitants, but he cloaks these tidbits in sensitive, literary language which makes his work a delight to read.

While many naturalists are drawn to the desert to study its diverse plants, birds, herps, and insects, its amazing water-bound inhabitants often go overlooked. In Relicts of A Beautiful Sea, Norment explores the habitat and habits of one rare salamander, four pupfish, and a toad — all of which persist in a precarious desert environment. (The species are: the Inyo Mountain slender salamander, the Owens pupfish, Salt Creek and Cottonball Marsh pupfish, Devil’s Hole ppupfish, and the black toad.) Deserts are defined by their lack of water, and yet the water-loving species he writes of have persisted across millenia and long spans of geological time. They are holdovers from another, wetter time; a time when the current desert floor was the submerged bed of an inland freshwater lake 600 feet deep and 80 miles long, a lake which spread from the Panamint to Funeral Mountains.

Norment uses the rarity of these organisms to pivot away from an ecologist’s view of speices abundance and distribution and wade into a philosophical landscape where he ponders whether these animals can teach us something about loneliness, the tenacity of life, and trascendence.

(Review) Searching for Pekpek: Cassowaries and Conservation in the New Guinea Rainforest, by Andrew Mack

Cover of Searching for Pekpek, by Andrew Mack

Searching for Pekpek is a moving story about a rainforest biologist who pioneered studies in parts of Papua New Guinea which were too remote and rugged for most biologists to bother visiting. But Andrew Mack’s risks paid off in big rewards: not only in the research he produced, but in the vision of conservation he came to embrace and inspire.

Pekpek is a term the semi-nomadic Pawai’ia people use to describe the substance scientists refer to as “scat,” (more commonly known as feces). Go ahead, giggle. It’s okay, really. But if you’re unfamiliar with scatology, know this: these little packets of biological refuse are rife with revelatory information. They can help uncover things like an animal’s diet composition, the role of animals in dispersing seeds, and even hormone profiles and health conditions — and for this reason, biologists often go to great lengths to collect freshly deposited scats.

But let’s get back the Pawai’ia of Papua New Guinea… this people group occupies tribal lands within the area Mack focused his studies, which was largely centered on Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area. This conserved area is located roughly south of Goroka in central Papua New Guinea (which is the eastern half of the island of New Guinea — notably, the world’s second largest island). It’s an area of mature rainforest characterized by rivers, waterfalls, gorges, and rugged slopes coated in mud the likes of which most North Americans have never experienced. Mack wished to study cassowary scat in particular because these large forest birds, tall as a person, eat the fruits of rainforest trees and then disperse the tree’s seeds elsewhere. But where? And to what advantage to the tree? By studying where cassowaries ate individual fruits, which he painstakingly tagged with uniqie identifiers, where the birds eventually expelled the seeds, and where seedlings eventually grew Mack planned to answer questions about the evolutionary advantage to rainforest trees of producing fruits which depend upon these lumbering birds — seemingly left over from the age of dinosaurs — for dispersal. 

(Review) Global Weirdness, by Climate Central

Cover of Global Weirdness

I picked up Global Weirdness on a whim while browsing at my local bookstore, Malaprops, in Asheville, NC. Which is oddly apropos, because this bookstore is a mere half mile away from the National Climatic Data Center, a NOAA entity tasked with the lofty responsibility of being our nation’s weather-data keeper. (The NCDC preserves climate and weather records, and monitors and assesses weather and climate globally. Not a small job.) Ever since moving to Asheville 2-1/2 years ago, I’ve wanted to write a climate-related story or two that involves the NCDC. But I’ve felt thwarted by my lack of expertise on climate change (where to start?); and as the scientific field snowballed I began to feel a bit left behind in understanding what it’s all about.

This book provided the perfect gateway for learning the basics of the science behind climate change. It’s authored by writers and researchers of Climate Central, which is one of the most reliable sources of information for communicating climate issues. The book’s back cover promised that it would  “summarize the facts behind climate change … in clear language.” It fulfilled that promise, to the Nth degree. A good dose of that accessiblity is due to the involvement of one of the lead authors, Mike Lemonick. I’ve known of Lemonick’s work for awhile through my involvement with the NASW, and I’ve previsouly read many of his articles. He’s a veteran science writer and I could see his fingerprints and hear his writing voice thoughout the entire book. (Go here for a series of video interviews with him about making Global Weirdness.) 

Dogged Detection: How dogs help locate human remains

Author Cat Warren and Solo, photo courtesty of D.L. Anderson.

This is a Q&A with author Cat Warren that I wrote last month, it ran in the Charlotte Observer on April 20. (Shared with the News & Observer on the same day.) I’m reposting it on Wild Muse. Selfishly, I loved having the chance to interview Warren because I had recently read her book, What the Dog Knows: The Science and Wonder of Working Dogs (Simon and Schuster 2013) and could not put it down. I was enthralled to learn more about her work with dogs that detect human remains, and she didn’t disappoint!  – TDB

Cadaver dogs have been searching the recent mudslide in Oso, Wash., to recover victims’ remains. But how do dogs sniff out the perfume of death? N.C. State associate English professor Cat Warren authored “What the Dog Knows: The Science and Wonder of Working Dogs,” a 2013 book (Simon & Schuster; $26.99) about her experience working with a cadaver dog, law enforcement and forensics experts. (Questions and answers have been edited.)

Q. What compounds are cadaver dogs sniffing out?

A. There are any number of volatile compounds that make up human remains. You want a dog who is trained to recognize a whole range of scents related to death, whether it’s coming from dried bones or the recently dead. Dogs exposed to this range in training have no trouble. The dog is trained to trek back and forth until it picks up the edge of a scent, then it tries to get to the spot where that scent is most concentrated. The dog’s body language changes, and the dog’s handler knows when the dog is “in scent”; they see the dog slow down, concentrate, and work its nose really hard. But the dog should also have a trained final indication, an alert. For both my dogs, Solo and Coda, they lie down.

Q. How do the dogs filter out carcasses of wild animals at a search site?

(Review) Stand Up That Mountain, by Jay Erskine Leutze

Stand Up That Mountain (Cover)

For the past year or so I’ve struggled with a sense of helplessness about the environmental calamities we face now and in the future. Extinctions. Pollution. Biological invasions. Over hunting. Desertification. Dying rivers. Mountain top removal. Climate destabilization. The list goes on.

There are days, weeks even, when the only way I can muddle through is to wrap all of it up and push it aside. In short, I feel beat. Helpless, even. The part of me who wants to change the world rails against the part of me that knows I can’t actually change the Big Picture Things that desperately need it: I can’t save the red wolf, or halt the seas from rising, any more than I can prevent the lowly but numerous wooly adelgids from sucking the life out of all the hemlock trees in western North Carolina, until they too disappear.

It was amid this puddle of dark thinking that I began reading Stand Up That Mountain: The Battle to Save One Small Community in the Wilderness Along the Appalachian Trail. Originally I picked this book up because it’s an environmental story of regional interest to me — I live but a few counties southwest of the mountains where the story unfolds. But from the first page, Leutze’s writing sang and I knew this was a very special piece of work to be savored and studied.

Stand Up That Mountain is a true story, but it’s written as if it were a novel. It has a set of heroes who pit themselves David-and-Goliath fashion against a good-ole-boy villain and his minions to rescue their town from surefire environmental destruction. But Leutze doesn’t let any of his characters fall prey to trope or caricature: they are all complicated, real, flawed people who he portrays in all their strengths, frailties, quirks, and commonalities.

(Review) Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures

Cover of Animal Wise

If you’ve ever gazed at your dog, cat, parrot or pet fish and wondered, What are you thinking? What are you feeling? then Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures is just the book for you. A few centuries ago, scientists scoffed at the idea of animals harboring the ability to think much less feel emotions. Some conceived of them, along Descartesian philosophical lines, as not much more than preprogrammed flesh-covered robots which enacted different behavioral routines in response to specific stimuli.

In Animal Wise, Morell expertly tells a tale of how mainstream science learned to ask the right questions in order to study animal emotions and the ability of different species to think, plan, and problem solve, as well as their ability to feel emotions. Although early in the book she discards the idea that there are lower and higher orders of animals, she chose to arrange  the book chapters in order from animals that have comparatively simplistic brain anatomy to animals with increasing complexity. As a result, the  reader moves through the labs and field sites of scientists studying ants, to those of fish, birds, rats, elephants, dolphins, chimpanzees, gorillas, dogs, and wolves. Among a few other behavioral oddities, we learn that ants intentionally teach their fellow nestmates; rats laugh when tickled — and will even seek someone out for a festive bout of sensory joy; not every “mooooo” is the same — cows have linguistic differences akin to our regional dialects; confined dolphins can develop crushes on their trainers and attempt to elicit sex; and elephants sometimes visit and linger over the bones of their departed herd members.

Wild Muse’s top Christmas book picks

Shopping for books for a wildlife lover, tree-hugger, naturalist, or conservationist in your gift-giving circle? Here are a few titles to titilate their reading sensibilities:

Love, Life and Elephants, by Dame Daphne Sheldrick (2013). Sheldrick helped to pioneer husbandry methods for raising orphaned elephants so young that they were still dependent upon their mother’s milk. But she also cared for numerous other kinds of injured and orphaned wildlife in her time at Tsavo National Park. Although this book is heavy in the early parts with Sheldrick’s family history of settling in Kenya as British homesteaders in the first half of the 20th century, the story is laced throughout with observations of wildlife and interactions with individual animal oprhans, including: wild giraffes, hyenas, rhinoceros, raptors of all kinds, elusive kudu, gazelles, lions, leopards, oryx, ostriches and — of course — elephants.

Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures, by Virginia Morrel (2013). This books takes readers on an unforgettable jaunt through major recent changes in how scientists understand the intelligence of animals ranging from ants to fish, birds, dolphins and dogs. Morrel is an accomplished science writer and deftly unpacks research findings for her readers while touring research labs and meeting with scientists across the world.

The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival, by John Vaillant (2010). Can a tiger hold a vendetta against a person? This is a central question in Vaillant’s book, and he’s written a haunting tale you won’t soon forget. It’s based on true events that transpired in Russia’s Far East in the late 1990s. The truth of the events portrayed in this book will stalk your conscience until you are forced to confront several revelations: that tigers may possess an intelligence which allows for pre-meditated action, that tigers may have emotions and act upon them, that tigers may have the emotive and cognitive capacities to possess grudges and enact vendettas, and that most humans who don’t live with wild tigers tend to downplay and discredit these possibilities.

(Review) Collared: Politics and Personalities in Oregon’s Wolf Country

Cover of COLLARED, by Aimee Lyn Eaton (OSU Press 2013)

No matter where people and wolves share the same landscape, conflict inevitably arises. Sometimes the conflicts are based in reality; sometimes they are not. Few animals other than wolves are able to consistently elicit in us deep emotional and political responses — responses that polarize us as stakeholders in their well-being, or polarize us as community members.

When wolves were reintroduced to the Northern Rocky Mountains in 1996, from two source populations released in Yellowstone National Park and in central Idaho, it was with the understanding that they would eventually tread beyond these places and reclaim lands long lost to them. Oregon was predicted to be one of the first states to receive dispersing wolves seeking new home ranges and hunting grounds. Livestock ranchers in Oregon braced for these events with trepidation. In the spring of 1999, the first wandering wolf crossed the Snake River and into Oregon’s Hells Canyon Wilderness — the young female yearling’s arrival occured about seven years earlier than predicted. That was all it took to wake Oregonians to the possibility of wolves in their midst.

Aimee Lyn Eaton’s new book, Collared: Politics and Personalities in Oregon’s Wolf Country, takes a fine-scaled in-depth look at the political process of Oregon’s preparations for receiving gray wolves. But she also puts stakeholders in her cross-hairs and reports on the multiplicity of perspectives held by biologists, ranchers, rural citizens and conservationists.

(Review) Love, Life, and Elephants: An African Love Story, by Dame Daphne Sheldrick

Love, Life and Elephants: An African Love Story

There aren’t many autobiographies which hold the power to lock horns with my attention and hold it captive for days on end until the last page is turned. But this one did. Perhaps this is because I tend to be more interested in reading about wildlife and nature than people, and perhaps this is because Love, Life and Elephants contains a series of deeply gripping emotional tales of the personal lives of rescued and orphaned wild animals in Kenya’s famous Tsavo-East National Park.

Sheldrick is best known for her work caring for orphaned elephants. She helped pioneer husbandry methods to nurse motherless milk-dependent elephant calves to survival. Prior to her work these newly born mammals faced a near certain death once their mothers were lost. But Sheldrick’s memoir is about much more than this singular achievement. It’s a history of her British family homesteading in Kenya at a point in time when the Crown was encouraging colonization there; and their subsequent feeling of abandonment and cultural isolation when the British government ultimately pulled out of Kenya.

Her family felt torn between two countries: culturally they were English, but they had poured years of time and energy into carving productive farms and ranchland from the Kenyan soil. Sheldrick wrote: “Labelled the White Tribe of Africa, we were rapidly losing our stake in the country we viewed as home and could never be truly British again, due to long isolation in Africa. Nor could we be truly African either, because of our colour and culture.” Though Sheldrick viewed herself as an Englishwoman living in Kenya, she knew she could never return to Great Britain; and in this way she felt keenly the isolation and abandonment that her many wild orphans experienced, the singular sense of being on your own. Maybe it was this shared sentiment that led her to become a deeply nurturing and loving surrogate mother to so many motherless wild animals.

(Review) How Animals Grieve, by Barbara J. King

Have you ever witnessed a pet or captive animal grieve? How did you know what it was feeling?

In order to feel grief, one must also feel love. Most likely, you just read that sentence and thought it so uncontroversial as to be absurd. But now imagine that the “one” under discussion is a… goat? How about a chicken, or a cat? Now, what do you think about that statement?

In her book, How Animals Grieve, anthropologist and author Barbara J. King explores a multitude of anecdotes about animals that appear, to human eyes, to experience what we know as grief. Cats who keen for recently deceased siblings. Goats who search frantically for missing goat-friends. Horses who encircle the exact patch of land where their herd mate was buried in a pasture. An emotionally insecure elephant who leaves her beloved security object, a tire, on the body of her beloved dog companion. These intriguing stories, and many more, form the core of King’s exploration of how individual animals grieve over lost relatives and companions.

It’s deeply telling that King, who is a practicing anthropologist at the College of William and Mary, titled her book How Animals Grieve (emphasis mine), rather than asking: Do Animals Grieve? From the beginning, it’s clear she believes some animals experience grief, in ways that are different from how we understand grief to be, though still recognizably within the realm of sadness, depression, and a deep awareness of the loss of something or someone near and dear.

Scientists typically caution against interpreting animal behaviors within the suite of our human behaviors and emotions. Anthropomorphism, as it’s called, is viewed as a big no-no. Biologists and experimental animal behaviorists tend to view anthropomorphism as folksy, unprofessional  and even flat-out wrong. But recently, a case is being made that the scientific community has gone too far in disallowing themselves to interpret animal emotions in relation to our own. (After all, if you go back far enough, we evolved from a common animal ancestor.) King writes, “The skpetics have a point: rather than accept uncritically the existence of animal grief, or animal love, or any other complex emotion in non-human animals, we should first weigh other, simpler explanations.” This is exactly what King does throughout the book as she recounts anecdotes of how surviving animals behaved after losing a sibling or close companion;