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Mark your calendar for summer releases that demystify wolves, parasites, and the wacky world of animal sex.
Charismatic and controversial species like wolves are no strangers to the spotlight, but leeches rarely get their due. Douglas Smith’s illustrated guide to wolf behavior and conservation is one of a few forthcoming books on one of history’s most vilified mammals; meanwhile, Dino Martins trains a curious eye on another maligned group: parasites.
Those are just two of the new animal-focused books we’re looking forward to reading this summer. Our other picks take a broader view, criss-crossing the planet to explore the structure of animal civilizations and the world’s wild variety of reproduction. All of them illustrate how far we’ve come in understanding the natural world — and how much we have left to learn.
The Hidden Nations of Animals: A Grand Tour of Earth’s Wild Civilizations
Written Ryan Huling, with maps and illustrations by Oliver Uberti
On sale June 2
Huling interviews ecologists, anthropologists, geographers, and historians to reveal the ways animals organize — and defend — their communities, which sprawl across Central Asia or lurk in the shadows of our own metropolises. Cartographer Oliver Uberti contributes drawings and maps to illustrate how these hidden communities interact with the human and natural environment. Taking an expansive view that incorporates technology, history, and biology, Huling shows that when we abandon the notion that humans have a lock on civilization, new worlds emerge.
The Book of Birds: A Field Guide to Wonder and Loss
By Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris
On sale June 9
In 2019, a comprehensive assessment of North American bird populations found that since 1970, the continent had lost almost 3 billion mating adults, a staggering finding that points to an unraveling ecosystem. In their previous book, The Lost Words, Macfarlane and Morris wrote and illustrated “spell-poems” to preserve and celebrate words for nature, like “acorn” and “dandelion,” that have been supplanted in children’s dictionaries by words like “blog” and “broadband.” In The Book of Birds, they feature about 50 disappearing species, from avocets to kingfishers, in essays that describe their behaviors and habitats but also lyrically illuminate their greatest threats and how their lives interact with ours. Each entry features Morris’s watercolor and gold-leaf illustrations, painted from life.
Wolf: The Illustrated Biography
By Douglas W. Smith
On sale June 23
Douglas Smith has studied wolves and other wildlife in Yellowstone National Park and elsewhere for more than four decades, and he helped to reintroduce wolves to the park. His illustrated compendium profiles global wolf populations and demystifies their daily lives — how they travel, build dens, learn to hunt, and establish pack hierarchies and bonds. Smith brings his front-line experience to bear when he ties the facts of wolves’ lives to broad and difficult questions of how to conserve and coexist with this charismatic and much-maligned species.
On the Origin of Sex: The Weird and Wonderful Science of Reproduction
By Lixing Sun
On sale June 30
A preteen who sneaks this off the shelf is liable to be disappointed — or fascinated. Biologist Lixing Sun delves into the weird and wacky reproduction of algae, fish, birds, lizards, slime molds, and more, and manages to make concepts like parthenogenesis, a type of asexual reproduction, fun. And once you find out slime mold reproduction can involve a carnival of hundreds of mating types or that temperature fluctuations can cause bearded dragons to change sex, human sex may start to seem downright boring.
Hidden Creatures: Luscious Leeches, Bashful Botflies, and the Wondrous, History-Shaping World of Parasites
By Dino Martins
On sale July 7
Award-winning entomologist Dino Martins travels through geologic time and across continents to explore some of the planet’s most enigmatic and least understood creatures. Parasites get a bad rap as freeloaders and bloodsuckers, but they’re marvels of evolutionary adaptation. Engaging and curious, Martins describes their uses in medicine and cuisine and explores their remarkable abilities, from the tsetse fly’s hide-piercing mouth to the tapeworm’s ability to grow to more than 120 feet deep within the guts of a whale.
