Fans of wolves in the wild will learn much from McIntyre’s career-spanning account.
Longtime wolf biologist and former Yellowstone ranger sums up decades of observing Canis lupus.
“Wolves, like humans, are thinking beings that are constantly making choices and decisions,” writes McIntyre. One set of choices and decisions has to do with where and how to live: entering adulthood, wolves must position themselves in the pecking order, challenging the alpha or meekly accepting a role as beta; alternately, they disperse to find a new pack with better chances for advancement, a risky choice given that some wolves will kill an intruder. McIntyre has witnessed all these behaviors, as well as acts that, even recognizing the dangers of anthropomorphism, would have to be classed as heroic. Of one wolf known as 949—biologists do not name the wolves in order to avoid developing too much nonscientific attachment to them—McIntyre writes, he “had distemper, which is highly infectious. In his final days, he stayed away from the pack, stoically enduring his fate.” Another had a broken jaw, likely earned from an elk kick, that must have meant excruciating pain; yet, McIntyre notes, the wolf lived on until dying while protecting his pack, unquestionably noble. Doffing scientific detachment, McIntyre writes with clear admiration of the great qualities and accomplishments of the Yellowstone packs, particularly of numerous elders that have lived several lifetimes beyond the average of three years in the wild. An especially affecting moment comes when he buries blood, taken from the body of an alpha female named 926, at the site where she had played as a pup: “That small amount of blood, her life force, along with moisture and nutrients from the soil, would be carried up through the tree trunk.…That meant a little bit of 926 would abide in that tree.”
Fans of wolves in the wild will learn much from McIntyre’s career-spanning account.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2024
ISBN: 9781778401251
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Greystone Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Are rivers alive? Macfarlane delivers a lucid, memorable argument in the affirmative.
The accomplished British nature writer turns to issues of environmental ethics in his latest exploration of the world.
In 1971, a law instructor asked a musing-out-loud question: Do trees have legal standing? His answer was widely mocked at the time, but it has gained in force: As Macfarlane chronicles here, Indigenous groups around the world are pressing “an idea that changes the world—the idea that a river is alive.” In the first major section of the book, Macfarlane travels to the Ecuadorian rainforest, where a river flows straight through a belt of gold and other mineral deposits that are, of course, much desired; his company on a long slog through the woods is a brilliant mycologist whose research projects have led not just to the discovery of a mushroom species that “would have first flourished on the supercontinent [of Gondwana] that formed over half a billion years ago,” but also to her proposing that fungi be considered a kingdom on a footing with flora and fauna. Other formidable activists figure in his next travels, to the great rivers of northern India, where, against the odds, some courts have lately been given to “shift Indian law away from anthropocentrism and towards something like ecological jurisprudence, underpinned by social justice.” The best part of the book, for those who enjoy outdoor thrills and spills, is Macfarlane’s third campaign, this one following a river in eastern Canada that, as has already happened to so many waterways there, is threatened to be impounded for hydroelectric power and other extractive uses. In delightfully eccentric company, and guided by the wisdom of an Indigenous woman who advises him to ask the river just one question, Macfarlane travels through territory so rugged that “even the trout have portage trails,” returning with hard-won wisdom about our evanescence and, one hopes, a river’s permanence and power to shape our lives for the better.
Are rivers alive? Macfarlane delivers a lucid, memorable argument in the affirmative.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780393242133
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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