This year has brought dozens of new books about some of the world’s most fascinating — and often, endangered — species.
In fact, there are far more of them than we can wrap up in one column, so here are 10 of the most notable new titles that have crossed our desks so far this year. They cover apes, bats, birds, wolves, insects, trees, fish — okay, just about everything. These books often take deep dives into a single species, revealing the complexities of their lives and their often-fraught coexistence with humans. They also offer new reasons to appreciate these animals — including maligned wildlife like starlings and snakes — and the latest science on how to protect them.
We’ve excerpted the books’ official descriptions below and provided links to the publishers’ sites, but you should also be able to find these books in a variety of formats through your local bookstore or library.
Look for more wildlife books in upcoming columns — including some great titles for kids.
Starlings: The Curious Odyssey of a Most Hated Bird
By Mike Stark
A great book authored by one of our colleagues at the Center for Biological Diversity.
Has there ever been a more hated bird than the European starling? Let loose in New York City’s Central Park by a misguided aristocrat, the starlings were supposed to help curb insect outbreaks and add to the tuneful choir of other songbirds. Rather than staying put, the dark and speckled starlings marched across the continent like a conquering army. In less than sixty years, they were in every state in the contiguous United States and their numbers topped two hundred million. Cities came under siege; crops buckled beneath their weight. Public sentiment quickly soured. A bitter, baffling, and sometimes comical war on starlings ensued… Stark’s Starlings is a first-of-its-kind history of starlings in America, an oddball, love-hate story at the intersection of human folly, ornithology, and one bird’s tenacious will to endure.
By Alix Morris
It might be their large, strangely human eyes or their dog-like playfulness, but seals have long captured people’s interest and affection, making them the perfect candidate for an environmental cause, as well as the subject of decades of study. Alix Morris spends a year with these magnetic creatures and brings them to life on the page, season by season, as she learns about their intelligence, their relationships with each other, their ecosystems, and the changing climate.
The Weird and Wonderful World of Bats: Demystifying These Often-Misunderstood Creatures
By Alyson Brokaw
These woefully misunderstood creatures dwell in darkness, inspire fear, and threaten danger. They’ve been viewed as the pawns of evil deities and taken the undeserved blame for the spread of deadly viruses. The Weird and Wonderful World of Bats provides a fresh introduction to these curious flying mammals, explaining how they experience the world through unique senses, where and how they fly, the origins of their complex relationships with humans, and how we can learn from them — not only to coexist, but potentially grow healthier and wiser together.
TreeNotes: A Year in the Company of Trees
By Nalini Nadkarni
Telephone poles, baseball bats, railroad ties. Peaches, nutmeg, and vanilla. The more you look, the more you realize: Our world depends on products made from trees. In this sweet book, forest ecologist Nalini Nadkarni takes you on a worldwide journey to learn more about trees — their variety, their usefulness, their beauty, and their importance, not only to human culture, but to the entire natural world.
The Other Ten Wolves: A Yellowstone Backstory
By Carter Niemeyer
In a bittersweet blend of science and yarn, wolf expert Carter Niemeyer takes us back to 1996 on a heart-pounding, eye-witness adventure to add ten more wolves — the Sawtooth pups — to Yellowstone’s newly reintroduced wolf packs. So much could go wrong. So much did go wrong. But in the end, the other ten wolves helped change the character of Yellowstone’s wolves forever.
By Peter Kuper
Award-winning cartoonist Peter Kuper transports readers through the 400-million-year history of insects and the remarkable entomologists who have studied them. This visually immersive work of graphic nonfiction dives into a world where ants, cicadas, bees, and butterflies visit a library exhibition that displays their stories and humanity’s connection to them throughout the ages. Kuper’s thrilling visual feast layers history and science, color and design, to tell the remarkable tales of dung beetles navigated by the stars, hawk-size prehistoric dragonflies hunting prey, and mosquitoes changing the course of human history. Kuper also illuminates pioneering naturalists, galvanized by the sixth extinction and the ongoing insect crisis, Kuper takes readers on an unforgettable journey.
The Ocean’s Menagerie: How Earth’s Strangest Creatures Reshape the Rules of Life
By Drew Harvell
An elegantly written exploration of the cutting-edge science of the strangest and most remarkable creatures on our planet by a leading marine biologist: Hundred-year-old giant clams, coral kingdoms that rival human cities, and jellyfish that glow in the dark. As our planet rapidly changes, the biomedical, engineering, and energy innovations of these wonderous creatures inspire ever more important solutions to our own survival. This book is a tale of biological marvels, a story of a woman’s passionate connection to an adventurous career in science, and a call to arms to protect the world’s most ancient ecosystems.
The Golden Toad: An Ecological Mystery and the Search for a Lost Species
By Trevor Ritland and Kyle Ritland
As young boys, Trevor and Kyle Ritland were fascinated by the magnificent golden toad of Costa Rica, a brilliant species their biologist father showed them in his projector’s slide shows. Native to only one wind-battered ridgeline high on the continental divide above the cloud forests of Monteverde, thousands of golden toads would congregate for a few weeks each year in ephemeral pools among the twisted roots to mate, deposit their offspring, and retreat again beneath the earth. But from one year to the next, the toads disappeared without a trace; the last of them vanished more than thirty years ago. Since then, only rumors remain — alleged sightings by local residents, which beg the question: could the golden toad still be alive?
Slither: How Nature’s Most Maligned Creatures Illuminate Our World
By Stephen S. Hall
For millennia, depictions of snakes as alternatively beautiful and menacing creatures have appeared in religious texts, mythology, poetry, and beyond. From the foundational deities of ancient Egypt to the reactions of squeamish children today, it is a historically commonplace belief that snakes are devious, dangerous, and even evil. But where there is hatred and fear, there is also fascination and reverence. How is it that creatures so despised and sinister, so foreign of movement and ostensibly devoid of sociality and emotion, have fired the imaginations of poets, prophets, and painters across time and cultures?
Apes on the Edge: Chimpanzee Life on the West African Savanna
By Jill Pruetz
While most primate research occurs in isolated reserves, Fongoli chimpanzees live alongside humans, and as primatologist and anthropologist Jill Pruetz reports, this shared habitat creates both challenges and opportunities. The issues faced by Fongoli chimpanzees — particularly food scarcity and environmental degradation — are also issues faced by their human neighbors. This connection is one reason Pruetz, who has studied Fongoli apes for over two decade…decided to write this book, the first to offer readers a view of these chimps’ lives and to explain the specific conservation efforts needed to help them.
That’s it for this month, but you can find hundreds of additional environmental book recommendations, including many more about wildlife of all shapes and sizes, in the “Revelator Reads” archives.
And let us know what you’re reading: drop us a line at [email protected]
Previously in The Revelator:
Comics for Earth: Eight New Graphic Novels About Saving the Planet and Celebrating Wildlife