No Way Home

the Decline of the World's Great Animal Migrations
by David S. Wilcove

I didn't finish this one. I read fifty pages. No fault of the book- I'm just very busy with starting the garden, dealing with things in my aquariums, the kids' school activities and so on. Reading has to fit into the margins right now, and this one just didn't have me eagerly turning pages every few minutes I could sit idle here and there. I'm returning it and hope to pick it up again at a later date.

It's about how animal migrations have been disrupted by human activity and habitat loss. Each chapter looks at a specific type of wildlife- the one I read was on birds (songbirds in particular) and it was very detailed, but I found the writing a bit dry so it was hard for me to stick with it. Later chapters - I gathered by skimming- are about monarch butterflies, wildebeest and other herbivores in Africa, bison and pronghorn in the American West, whales and sea turtles, salmon and other fish that travel up freshwater streams to spawn. Most cases are about how animals need to travel to follow food sources, or reach places where they can safely raise their young, how scientists have tracked them and learned about all this. The data about how travel routes have been disrupted and thus animal populations fallen, are kind of staggering if you haven't read about it before. There's some suggestions for how we can reverse the damage and support the animals' needs, but overall it sounded kind of glum. But then, I didn't read the whole thing so can't say.

I hope to revisit this one soon.
Borrowed from the public library.

Abandoned               245 pages, 2008