Even More Lesser Spotted Animals: More Brilliant
Beasts You Never Knew You Needed to Know About. By Martin Brown. David
Fickling Books. $18.99.
To begin with, “brilliant” in this book’s
subtitle does not mean “exceptionally smart.” It is an Australian and British
term for “exciting,” “wonderful,” “really neat,” and so forth. Martin Brown has
two reasons for using the word that way, having started out in Australia before
moving some years ago to Great Britain.
However, there really is something
brilliant, in the North American sense of “quite smart indeed, chaps,” about
this sequel to Lesser Spotted Animals.
Brown correctly points out in the introduction to Even More Lesser Spotted Animals that “there are thousands of
different types of wild animal out there, each one with a name and a story all
its own,” but there are only a few superstars that we hear about again and
again and again. Elephants, zebras, polar bears, pandas and such are “marquee”
animals, highly useful in government and nongovernment fundraising campaigns
and great for “save the endangered critters” presentations, since everybody
already knows them so well.
But there is a curse to familiarity, or
rather to too much of it: many other, equally deserving and equally intriguing
animals are completely neglected, even if they too are fascinating to see,
worthwhile to learn about, and in some cases are every bit as endangered as the
better-known creatures out there. So it is redress-the-balance time in Brown’s
series – which, however, still has a prejudicial flaw that somewhat limits its
exploratory value. But more of that anon.
What Brown does so well in Even More Lesser Spotted Animals, as in
its predecessor, is to find really interesting-looking animals with really
interesting characteristics, present exceptionally well-made, near-photographic
drawings of them, and detail their habitats, their lifestyles and their challenges
in an unusually well-blended mixture of fact and amusement. For example, there are
dingisos, endangered, fuzzy-faced tree kangaroos from New Guinea that local
Moni people believe are ancestor spirits – which, they say, is why the animals,
when approached, rear up on their hind legs, raise their arms, and whistle. No
one really knows why they do this, but Brown shows a dingiso behaving exactly
this way and saying, “Hello! Probably.”
On another page, Brown introduces “two
gliders: aerial possums from eastern Australia,” explaining the similarities
and differences between the near-threatened yellow-bellied glider and the
not-threatened-at-all feathertail glider – the latter being the smallest glider
of all, which Brown says is “as big as a mouse (but cuter).” Brown gives the
size of all animals in his book, such as the “guinea pig big” sengi, which used
to be called the elephant shrew but turns out not to be a shrew and not to look
much like an elephant. Brown is also fond of throwing in bits of offbeat and/or
moderately disgusting facts, showing a sengi picking its nose with its
super-long tongue and, when it comes to red river hogs, noting that “they nose
through elephant dung for undigested seeds” (with a small picture showing one
of the animals examining a dung pile and exclaiming, “Yum!”).
One thing that Brown brings to Even More Lesser Spotted Animals that he
did not include in the previous book is actual storytelling, which he uses for
a couple of the animals to vary the presentation of facts a bit. For example,
when discussing the “tamandua: South America’s treetop termite terminator,” he
explains that this eater of ants and termites would “be the thing of your
nightmares” if you were an ant or
termite. He then goes on with the narrative: “It begins with a ripping crash as
the walls of your home are torn away by powerful arms and terrible claws. …Even
if your soldier ants try to fight back, they can’t get past the thick fur that
protects the tamandua’s skin from bites and stings.” This is an unusual and
appealing way to present some of the information here, and it reaches its apex
in the discussion of the ringtail cat – a small carnivorous animal once called
the “miner’s cat.” For this animal, Brown creates an entire little story about
a miner named Jed who lets one ringtail stay in a “little wooden box” nearby
and is happy to have “that stripy-tailed critter” around because it neatly
disposes of mice and rats, and is so agile that “he’d seen the darn thing turn
a cartwheel chasing a moth.”
There are some genuinely fascinating
animals in Even More Lesser Spotted
Animals, including several about which little is known because their
habitats are largely unexplored or their habits keep them well away from
anywhere that humans can track them. Brown certainly makes the case that all
these creatures are as worthy of being known, and as interesting to learn
about, as the “marquee animals” with which most people are far more familiar.
And what could be prejudicial about that? Well, it just so happens that every
single creature in Even More Lesser
Spotted Animals is a mammal – even the ones that fly (three bats and two
gliders) or swim (a beaked whale and the ribbon seal). True, we humans are
mammals as well, so perhaps Brown comes by his mammalian bias naturally. But
aren’t there lots and lots and lots
of critters that are not mammals and
that deserve to be better known: reptiles, birds, insects, fish, octopuses, and
many others? How can Brown turn his back on so many non-mammalian denizens of
our planet? Or could he perhaps be planning lots and lots and lots of further entries in the “lesser
spotted animals” series? If so, why, that’s brilliant!
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