Where the Wild Things Were by William Stolzenburg

(The birds are drawn to predators and the carrion they produce.) He also tests neutral sounds, such as running water, and a few unfamiliar noises including those of howler monkeys. In Alaska's Talkeetna Mountains, where moose live with both wolves and bears, he uses a portable loudspeaker to play wolf howls and raven caws. Such questions lead Berger on a whirl of research expeditions to Alaska, Siberia, Greenland and elsewhere, in an attempt to understand fear among moose, caribou, bison and other species.

In the six decades since wolves hunted here, Berger wonders, have elk lost their traditional fear of wolves? And if so, how many bloody lessons will they, and other species, need to get it back? Berger begins his memoir The Better to Eat You With at the base of Wyoming's Teton Range, where he watches two reintroduced wolves attack a fatally blase herd of elk.

For starters, the guy's been chased by an angry mother moose. Wildlife biologist Joel Berger understands fear more intimately than most. But fear, as two new books make clear, has its uses - not only as a critical survival strategy, but also as a supporting force for the entire natural world. From our modern perspective, fear is an annoyance, an inconvenient emotion to be fenced out or shot down. Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing PredatorsĪ world without fear sounds nice, doesn't it? Liberated from our dread of nosy bosses, environmental catastrophe, cocktail-party conversation and clumsy dentistry, we could wander the planet with a spring in our step and a gleam in our eye. The Better to Eat You With: Fear in the Animal World

Where the Wild Things Were by William Stolzenburg