Tag: 2/5- Just Okay

Yes, I’ve really been reading this one book for the past ten days. Slow going because I’ve been fairly busy so only had time to sit down and read briefly each day, and also because it was rather boring. Reading it reminded me of the Schaller book about lions. Like that one, this account is very factual- all kinds of data and charts. Numbers. The main focus is population fluctuations, how they are tied to prey numbers, specifically when rabbits had a huge dieoff due to myxomatosis. The studies took place in Great Britian. Which threw me off for a great while- I’ve seen this book on the shelf at my library over the past few visits, and was curious because I thought it was about turkey buzzards, which are a common vulture here where I live. I thought wouldn’t it be interesting to learn something about these rather despised birds, that you often see feeding on roadkill. But no, it’s about a kind of open-country generalist hawk that lives in Britian, comparable to the red-tailed hawk here. So I learned about a different kind of bird.

A few things did surprise me- I didn’t know that buzzards will eat worms, beetles and frogs. In fact, when other prey are scarce they spend hours ‘grubbing’ in fields for invertebrates, sometimes in large groups (up to thirty birds together!) That when you see them soaring in circles way up high, they’re not usually hunting for prey (like a vulture would do) but making a territorial display so other hawks know the area is taken (hunting is done from lookout perches closer to the ground). One buzzard eats about 157 rabbits per year, or 1,960 voles! Here’s a most curious tidbit: this stuff called ‘star jelly‘ which I’d never heard of, but apparently people find around the woods and fields in that part of the world, is according to this author, the oviducts of frogs that buzzards removed and discarded before eating.

At the end, I was just going to scan the appendices, which include even more charts of data, but found myself reading the few pages of actual logs, notes of real-time observations in the field. Those four pages were the most engaging of the entire book, for me. It seems this one was just not my style.

Borrowed from the public library.

This guy lived in southern California, sharing a house with a friend and her sister. The backyard was thickly overgrown and soon they found it harbored a feral cat colony. Not being “cat people”, they ignored the felines for a long time but often heard screaming out there at night, and found dead kittens mauled by raccoons. Coyotes also prowled, preying on the cats. Eventually seeing one more dead kitten was too many, and they decided to act. First feeding the cats, and scaring off the predators. Sometimes bringing small kittens in the house to protect them. Then started to notice that as the females were now healthier from getting better nourishment and the kittens surviving, the population was growing quickly. They found out about a spay/neuter/release program and went through the ordeal of capturing over a dozen very wild cats, transporting them to the vet, and then returning them to their outdoor territory to finish living out their lives.

Throughout the book the author veers between telling about the different cats, their personalities, and how well he got to know them (or didn’t, some were completely unapproachable and he only got glimpses), something of their relationships with each other, what it was like trying to manage their vet care, and so on- these parts I liked. Other parts of the book tell about his struggles to find regular work, to get into the film industry (he wrote screenplays), and of his past travels to Asia where he embraced the culture and some religious aspects. I really started to get lost when he was talking about doing astrology readings for famous people, and looking for signs from the universe in all kinds of random, everyday incidents in his life. He goes into a lot of depth on this stuff sometimes. There’s also chapters that diverge into telling of the history of domestic cats, but I’ve already read enough about how cats were worshipped in Egypt, persecuted in the Middle Ages and colonial New England, valued by sailors and early agriculturalists, etc etc that it just wasn’t interesting. So I started skipping the history parts, and the parts that got too ‘woo-woo’ for my taste. And sometimes the overblown writing made me uncomfortable. For example, I know he was exaggerating when he described a raccoon so large it easily stepped over a seven foot high fence. But then how do I know he wasn’t inflating the gruesome details when a mother cat birthed kittens suddenly on the concrete slab right outside their door, and then ran off with kittens still attached to her body, dragged by their umbilical cords? and other such events.

I do really admire how much he loved and cared for these cats. How diligently he completed the spay/neuter program, even though it was difficult. How assiduously he provided them with good food and toxic-free cat litter (I didn’t know that was a concern) even though short on funds. Cleaning up diligently too, to avoid attracting rats and other pests- although nothing seemed to keep the raccoons away from the kittens they saw as prey. I didn’t know raccoons would kill young kittens so readily, but it sounds like this was a regular thing, and pretty awful to witness. When, in the end, most of the cats were healthy, all of them fixed, no more kittens coming into the picture, quite a few of the cats adjusted to living in the house, things all seemed calm and good for a while. Until their landlord dropped a bombshell: a relative was coming to live in that house, they had to go. What about the cats? The final chapters are about their scramble to find a new place to live that would accept all their indoor cats (still half-wild), and debating what to do with the outdoor colony- leave them to fend for themselves again? find a rescue group that would re-home them as barn cats? It was bittersweet to read near the end when they finally met the neighbors who’d lived behind them for over twenty years, those ladies loved the cats too (other neighbors seemed to view them as “crazy cat people” if they knew what was going on) really too bad they hadn’t had that connection earlier.

Borrowed from the public library. Note to self: never hesitate to add a book title to my TBR even if it’s not in the library system. When I put this book on my TBR list three years ago, it wasn’t available to borrow. But a few days ago browsing the shelves, I instantly recognized and snatched up this copy. You never know when your library is going to acquire the very books you want to read!

Based on the author’s real life experiences, this book is about a young man who returns to Africa after thirteen years away, to do conservation and volunteer work in wildlife parks. He travels down the Zulu river by canoe, assists at a wildlife rehabilitation center, and visits a game reserve in Kruger National Park. There are lots of encounters with wildlife- the larger and more dangerous ones like crocodiles, lions, hippos, rhinoceros, elephant, etc are particularly mentioned. Camraderie with his fellow volunteers is highlighted, while the narrator muses on how his first stay in Africa (those thirteen years ago) was soured by disagreements and teasing from his prior companions. Due to the awkwardness of his interactions and his near-encyclopaedic knowledge of animals, I did wonder if he was on the autism spectrum. The writing isn’t great. It feels flat, there’s lots of info dumping (though thankfully in short bursts) that feels like it’s supposed to be a part of conversations people naturally had, but is just a bit too forced. The dialog feels stiff and unnatural, it could easily be a record of what people actually said in real life, but it just doesn’t read well in a book. Too much is told, not shown- things I would love to see described in detail are simply mentioned in a single sentence and then the narrative quickly moves on.

I really struggled to finish this one. I wanted so much to like the content, but the execution was dull. There’s a slow love story in here, but I felt nothing about it at all. There are several chapters about a dangerous close encounter with man-eating lions, but it didn’t feel dramatic, tense or emotional to me, even though people were in fear for their lives. Doesn’t help to find a few typos, which always leap out at me. I did appreciate that as the book is very recent, some of the animal facts were new to me, all felt relevant especially the warnings on how many species are threatened or endangered, and the very real struggles of local and native people in South Africa to make a living and better their lives, while the wildlife eats their livestock or ruins their crops.

I received my copy from the Early Reviewers program on LibraryThing, as an e-book.