EAVESDROPPING ON ANIMALS

A Yellowstone wildlife ecologist and artist exhorts readers to open up our senses to the outdoors.

“Most of us spend our entire lives turning a blind eye and deaf ear toward animal conversations, chalking the chatter up to just more meaningless racket,” writes Bumann, decrying for the first of many times the unquiet desperation of our human habits. Point an ear toward the howl of a coyote, he continues, and you might hear—well, just a howl. Fine-tune your ear, and you may hear that the coyote is crying out the coyote word for “wolf,” not implausibly in a place like Yellowstone. Bumann’s notion that wildlife in conversation is as incessant and universal as human communication is pleasing, and his observation that “the sounds made and the gestures used by animals are anything but random” is well taken. On the other hand, Bumann reminds us that, yes, grasshoppers can hop much higher than humans, but it doesn’t add much to the human conversation for Bumann to say, “Who needs Marvel Comics when the nonhumans living in your own house or flowerbed can manage parallel feats?” Bumann’s account of experiences in the wild are the best part of the book, as he describes listening for differences in the calls made by prairie dogs, ravens, and owls; it’s good to learn that if you see butterflies atop a carcass or alongside a puddle, they’re likely to be male, since males “need to replenish essential salts, namely sodium, throughout the breeding season.” His occasional notes on self-guided nature study—find a place to visit regularly, make notes in a journal, grow a wild garden, and so forth—are the stuff of a thousand blog posts, though, tending to detract from his larger narrative on animal behavior.

A well meaning if sometimes preachy appreciation of the lessons of nature.