VANISHING TREASURES

Literature, folklore, history, and science inform these profiles of 22 endangered species.

The award-winning author of young adult books and a superb biography of John Donne turns her sharp literary style and wit to endangered animals in this brisk, eye-opening, thoroughly entertaining book. Animals who exhibit “everlasting flight, a self-galvanizing heart and a baby who learns names in the womb” may seem like inventions, she writes, but the natural world is "so startling that our capacity for wonder, huge as it is, can barely skim the surface." Meet the speedy swift, the American wood frog, and the dolphin. Early on, Rundell reminds us that we’ve lost “more than half of all wild things that lived.” The quick Australian wombat, one of poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s favorite pets, is “one of the rarest land mammals in the world.” It’s possible that some rarely seen, slow, half-blind Greenland sharks are more than 500 years old. She’s furious that America has refused to designate the giraffe as an endangered species, even though its numbers have dropped 40% in 30 years. She relishes the strength of the coconut hermit crab, named after the hard-shelled fruit it can crack open, whose intricate group interactions "make the politics of Renaissance courts look simplistic.” Of the eight species of bear, six are at risk or endangered, and "the number of hares in Britain has declined by 80 percent in the last century." Storks, conversely, are a “true success story of back-from-the-brink.” Other animals she regards with reverence and concern for their future are seahorses (the majority of their species could be gone by 2050), pangolins (“the world’s only rainbow mammal...currently the most trafficked animals in the world”), and the blind, iridescent golden mole, which can hear ants and beetles crawling aboveground. Young and old will savor Rundell’s infectious enthusiasm for these remarkable and infinitely varied creatures.

A clarion call for preservation by way of a delightful bestiary.