The Call of the Honeyguide: What Science Tells Us about How to Live Well with the Rest of Life by Rob Dunn

I enjoyed this book, and there are a lot of engaging stories told in it, but it is not ground breaking when read by someone with a life long interest and participation in science. It opens with a couple of interesting stories about inter species cooperation. The first is the one that the title of the book is derived from. In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, birds known as honeyguides once used a specific call to lead humans to beehives so they could split the spoils of wax and honey. The other takes place in southeastern Australia, wild orcas partnered with Thaua people to hunt baleen whales. The Inca empire banned the killing of cormorants and pelicans whose droppings fertilized their crops. These relationships are known as “mutualisms,” and the author suggests such dynamics were once common and could be again in this thought-provoking and wide-ranging exploration of how different species interact in cooperative ways. This is particularly important to think about at a time when so many people are trying to break things rather than fix them. The United States in particular has become a pugilistic bully with a fascist leader bent on getting his way and trampling everything and everybody in his way--instead, diplomacy and cooperation have gotten us so much further and benefitted the greatest number of people. May we go the way of the Honeyguide.