by Gregory McNamee

Readers of a literary bent have long known about the mysterious cat called the snow leopard, thanks in disproportionate measure to a single book by that title published by Peter Matthiessen in 1978. The Snow Leopard is not the only book to have been written about that high-altitude big cat, and Matthiessen is not the only seeker to have gone after it. That fact motivates Don Hunter’s anthology Snow Leopard: Stories from the Roof of the World (University Press of Colorado, $26.95), a lively gathering of facts and meditations. Here is one highlight: “As they evolved from common ancestors of the tiger, genetic changes adapted them perfectly for life in the most rugged, challenging, and desolate places in the world. They also thrive in a political world as rugged as the physical one, often complex but at times violent.” Thus Jan Janecka, a geneticist. Here is another, by Helen Freeman of the Snow Leopard Trust: “Snow leopard paws are huge, and cubs have a hard time keeping them under control. Cubs often walk as if their feet were encased in moon boots.” Just so, and any admirer of Matthiessen’s book will want to have this in his or her collection.

Say that, instead of a snow leopard, you were a banded mongoose, and a male banded mongoose at that. What would you do of a bright day in spring? Well, to judge by the account of Richard Despard Estes in The Behavior Guide to African Mammals (University of California Press, $39.95), you might just want to jockey for position within your pack, since “the dominance of breeding individuals somehow inhibits reproduction in low-ranking adults.” And what if you were a savanna baboon? Well, depending on your age, you might be a godfather to young males, protecting and teaching, reinforcing the mores of the group. Who knew that baboons had godfathers and godchildren? Estes did, for one, and his book, packed with an astonishing and illuminating trove of information, is just the thing for the budding zoologist or camera safari traveler, real or virtual, in the family.

If you were an ancient Greek—forgetting for a moment about baboons and mongooses and suchlike things—and you paid attention to the natural world, then you would have long been aware that the eroded, semiarid lands of the Mediterranean held ample clues to a world that was very different from the one you inhabited. Look into a cutbank, for instance, and you might find the mysterious things called fossils, whether tiny trilobites or big chunks of dinosaur bone. You might tell stories about them—tracing the origins of dragons, say, and the teeth that Cadmus sowed to those strange phenomena. As Adrienne Mayor writes in The First Fossil Hunters (Princeton University Press, $18.95), those stories—of, say, a “bone of staggering size” hauled up by a fisherman named Damarmenos of Eretria, or of the “bones of giants” that Empedocles pondered—would inform a kind of science, and that science would inform the science that followed it, and so on to the present. Science or no, those stories were things of wonder in themselves, and Mayor celebrates their workings.

Ducks are descendants of the wild mallard, with the exception of the Muscovy duck, descended from the South American wood duck. So we learn from Celia Lewis’s Illustrated Guide to Ducks and Geese (and Other Domestic Fowl) (Bloomsbury, $20), a lively guide to keeping backyard birds—a growing trend, as it happens, now that many municipalities have relaxed restrictions against such keeping. As for geese, well, having been terrorized by geese as a child, I might be tempted to say they’re descended from the infernal minions, save that, as Lewis rightly reminds us, many varieties of geese are quite gentle. The Chinese goose is not one of them: “They are intelligent birds,” Lewis writes, “and can take a dislike to a particular person or breed of dog.” Lewis’s illustrations are reminiscent of the best of Eric Sloane. And that’s high praise indeed.

“Wolf, wolf,” say the lambs and geese in the richly communicative farmyard that is the home of Babe, the pig, in the wonderful George Miller movie by that name. A different pig and a different but just as noisy barnyard figures in the luminous book Charlotte’s Web (Harper, $8.99), E.B. White’s beloved children’s classic. The book is full of the interplay, sometimes anthropomorphic but just as often natural, of many kinds of animals, notable among them a barn spider, Araneus cavaticus, named Charlotte. She is unabashed about what she does to feed herself: “I drink them—drink their blood. I love blood,” she says of the things that wander into the aforementioned web. Against his publisher’s wishes, as Michael Sims notes in his excellent book The Story of Charlotte’s Web (Walker & Company, $16), White gave the book a realistic ending—and by realistic, of course, we mean tragic, tragedy being the essential condition of life. White’s book celebrates its 60th anniversary this year, reason enough to give many copies to friends and family this holiday season.

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