The book fills us in on some of the great field biologists, and little by little we become comfortable with the jargon, understanding adaptive radiation and trophic cascades. He begins with travels in Indonesia, following in the footsteps of the self-supporting British naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace, who figured out natural selection at the same time as Darwin. His subject, Quammen says, is "the extinction of species in a world that has been hacked to pieces." To some, extinctions within an ecosystem are "relaxation to equilibrium." Others say "faunal collapse." Quammen prefers the phrase of the Smithsonian's Tom Lovejoy: "ecosystem decay." He has walked Tasmanian trails where thylacines once roamed and been ambushed on a trail in Indonesia by a Komodo dragon. For all those years and more he has been talking to biologists, sometimes in their university offices, other times on trails in Madagascar, in the Atlantic forest of Brazil, on what is left of Krakatau or on Guam at night, looking for brown tree snakes.
(The final one, on his fear that all surviving animals will end up as tame as city pigeons, appeared in the March issue.) For the past eight years he has traveled the world on a Guggenheim grant to see for himself some of the most endangered animals on the planet. This is only fitting because the last sentence will leave more than a few readers on their feet, punching the air with a fist and saying "Yes!"ĭavid Quammen is a Montana novelist who for the past 15 years has written a formidably researched column for Outside magazine. It is also a book of intellectual adventure, in which the excitement of new understanding builds over 600 pages until at last the baton is passed to the reader. This is a book of physical adventure - travels in exotic and even dangerous places to see extraordinary creatures.
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