Book reviews
A beaver, eight bears and an extinct auk: species books are back
Beaver Land: How OneWeird Rodent Made America by Leila Philip (2022) 352 pp.,Twelve, Hachette Book Group, New York, USA. ISBN 978-1-5387-5520-4 (pbk), USD 19.99.
Eight Bears: Mythic Past and Imperiled Future by Gloria Dickie (2023) 272 pp., W.W. Norton & Company, New York, USA. ISBN 978-1-324-00508-7 (hbk), USD 30.00.
The Last of its Kind: The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction by Gísli Pálsson (2024) 328 pp., Princeton University Press, Princeton, USA. ISBN978-0-691-23098- 6 (hbk), USD 27.95.
We are a species, our pets are species, ourmeals consist of species and when we’re sick it may very well be because of a species. Yet, we don’t see conservation books about species so much anymore. Other important topics are top of the conservation agenda, fromecosystem services to decolonization, rewilding and cli- mate change impacts. Of course, books about species are still being written, particularly for bird lovers, who seem to provide an inexhaust- ible market. But it is a rare treat to be able to review three conservation books about species. Many of us in the advanced stages of our
careers were reared on species books. In my case, I particularly remember books such as Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter, Gerald Durrell’s The Drunken Forest, Wild Animals I Have Known by Ernest Thompson Seton and Jim Kjelgaard’s books on dogs. It turns out that none of these books is really about an- imals themselves, but rather about the moral- ity of the human actors intertwined in the story. In many ways, they are updated forms of Aesop’s Fables or even medieval bestiaries, with a clear lesson the reader is supposed to learn and apply to their own life. These books are emotional—I cried at the end of Tarka—and left me with a deep appreciation and love of animals—or species, as I learnt to call them to hide my sentimentality. Such sentimentality about the natural
world went out of favour in my generation, but it has returned in recent years, with anx- iety and grief connected to climate change, species extinctions and biodiversity loss now more widely acknowledged. Extinction in par- ticular is often used as the framing for talking about species. The World Species Congress, held as an online event in May 2024, featured many talks on species either heading towards extinction or recovered from extinction, and
the vivid imagery and passion shown by the presenters—and expressed in many lan- guages—was a notable aspect of the event. In her fine, short book Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age, Dolly Jørgensen (2019) ob- serves that ‘since the Enlightenment, there has been an idea that humans should be ob- jective and scientific in their relationship with nature but .. . I want to show how funda- mental emotions are to how modern humans relate to nonhumans’ (p. 5). This interweaving of species extinction—
or recovery—and human feelings character- izes two of these books in particular, whose non-scientist authors, free from restrictions placed on academic writing, craft their texts about beavers and bears with passion and emotion. The third book, ostensibly about the great auk, is in fact about the discovery of the concept of extinction, and it, too, is told with a decidedly moving undertone. Thus, although the three books offer readers a range of species, stories and writing styles—and their narratives are told in differ- ent ways and with varying levels of success— they are all about the intertwined nature of human and non-human histories, and all of them are appealing to their readers’ emotions. Delving into these books in more detail, I
will start with the good news story about what may well be the most important mam- mal in North American history, or at least the USA and Canada: the North American beaver Castor
canadensis.Its close cousin, the Eurasian beaver Castor fiber, plays a per- ipheral role in Leila Philip’sstory,which fo- cuses on the species that, she argues in the book’ssubtitle, ‘made America’. Long fea- tured as a symbol of perseverance, resource- fulness and adaptability in tales told by Indigenous Americans, the beaver was the focus of more pecuniary purposes for European settlers. Beaver fur was valued for its ability to felt into a soft, yet resilient and water repellent material, and was used to make valuable hats (as it still is today for the most expensive Stetson hats). During the early years of the colonization of
North America, beaver hides were the natural resource most sought after by Europeans, and in NewEngland they becamecrucial for paying debts incurred while traveling from Europe. The pursuit of beaver pelts continued to drive European settler exploration throughout the continent and resulted in the catastrophic di- minishment of beaver populations. And with the loss of beavers came the loss of the key ecological role they play in dramatically influ- encing the hydrological conditions in the areas where they live.
Philip is less concerned with the biology of
the species than with its role in human history. She dwells on her personal experience of bea- vers and beaver-ness, weaving in accounts of travels and interviews that trace various hu- man–beaver dimensions, from the life of the fur baron Jacob Astor, her friend the beaver trapper and the culture of buying and selling skins, to business people working to install pseudo-beaver dams, and scientists docu- menting the hydrological attributes of areas influenced by beaver dams. She has a particu- lar fondness for people who have welcomed beavers into their lives and homes—self- trained beaver naturalists who have devoted themselves to all things beaver and joined ‘the terrain of American eccentrics’ (p. 9) who call themselves ‘beaver believers’ and hold meetings and conferences dedicated to these remarkable rodents. Philip, a professor at a US university, places herself clearly in this category of beaver believers and brings welcome attention to the voices of Indigenous Americans and their stories of beavers. She rejoices in the details of the bea- ver lives near her home, which she parallels and contrasts with the story of the gradual de- cline and death of her mother; emotion is woven throughout the book. Elevating the spirits of Philip, and others who feel depressed by the continuing decline of the natural world, is the fact that North American beavers are now turning up in many places where they were once extirpated, some on their own and some with the aid of humans. Wherever and by whichever means they arrive, their pres- ence has a profound effect on their surround- ings, as they build dams, create complex wetlands and enrich habitats for countless other species to thrive. In the second book, the eight species of
bears are the focus of Gloria Dickie’s global story. It is rare that bears are treated as a group; usually the particularly charismatic species such as polar, panda and grizzly/ brown bears are drawing the attention, where- as the spectacled bear (the only bear in South America), the sun bear of Southeast Asia and my personal favourite, the sloth bear, rarely get a mention. It is therefore awelcome change for an author to write about all (extant) bears, and Dickie does so with plenty of emotion. An environmental journalist, Dickie has
journeyed around the world to visit each of her subjects, and at times the book reads more like a travel journal than an account of the bears themselves: bears are the excuse but adventure is clearly the objective. We learn about bears almost exclusively through the author’spersonal
observations or her
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited. Oryx, 2024, 58(5), 677–680 © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605324001261
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