Each time I read a new chapter, I felt that this was going to be my favourite. Some of the animals we know full well are in trouble such as the pangolin, the hedgehog and the elephant, but others can be surprising; the spider and the crow. Here she is not talking about them as a whole, but specific species. The alala, a member of the crow family, has been declared extinct in the wild, though efforts are being made to reintroduce them. The world is more astonishing, more miraculous and more wonderful than our wildest imaginings. In this passionately persuasive and sharply funny book, Katherine Rundell tells us how and why. They are „stink-fighting“ - battling with rivals duing which they stand two feet apart and wipe their hands on their tails, then shake the tail at their opponent, all the while maintaining an aggressive stare until one or other animal retreats. In presenting us with a world “populated with such strangenesses and imperilled astonishments”, The Golden Mole also wants us to be angry and committed to conservation. Here, Rundell makes a number of powerful points. The age-old search for (almost certainly nonexistent) “natural aphrodisiacs” is “evidence of great human vulnerability, and enough stupidity to destroy entire ecosystems”. Several species would be far safer if we could just abandon our silly faith in the magical powers of tiger claws, rhino horns or the flesh of the coconut crab. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.

A wondrous ode to nature's astonishing beauty – and an elegy for all the life we are in the midst of destroying. This is a book filled with love and hope and whiskers and wings, by turns ravishing and devastating. No one sings the praises of the world quite like Katherine Rundell." The collection is intended as a “salute to glory rather than a text of fury”, seeking to inspire our determination to protect the animals and environments under threat from climate change and human activity: “I wanted a sense of accumulated beauty; that [ The Golden Mole] would end with a sense of wonderment, a sense that that which we live alongside is so much vaster than even our most vast imagination.” The ways in which attention can be alchemic, the way that attention is the absolute necessary pre-condition for any kind of change Did you know that a tuna is usually the size of a grizzly bear? The average is 1.8m but the bluefin usually is twice that and weighs around 600kg. From bears to bats to hermit crabs, a witty, intoxicating paean to Earth's wondrous creatures [...] shot through with Rundell's characteristic wit and swagger." By title alone The Golden Mole sounds as though it would be a charming book, a cross between a treasury and a bestiary. The subtitle is indeed “And Other Living Treasure”. At first glance its structure, short essays each prefaced with a beautiful, grey-on-gold illustration by Talya Baldwin, might suggest a children’s wildlife encyclopaedia or a coffee-table Christmas gift book. Rundell is indeed a children’s author and has been shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal; the book is indeed charming. She has mastered a sprightly, enthused tone for her essays, which come at their subjects from unexpected angles. She is good with the arresting opening line: “It was, perhaps, a hermit crab that ate Amelia Earhart.” “Hares have always been thought magic.” There is much lore and plenty of what the Americans call “fun facts”. Take hermit crabs, for example. Coconut hermit crabs are land crabs, so called because they can prise open a coconut. They can live to be 100 and grow to a metre across, “too large to fit in a bathtub, exactly the right size for a nightmare”. Fun facts, perhaps, but her purpose is serious.A book as rare and precious as a golden mole. A joyous catalogue of curiosities that builds into a timely reminder that life on planet is worth our wonder." It is among my proudest boasts, that I was massive Rundell fan before she became a national treasure." Rundell shows us that the human imagination often looks pedestrian next to nature’s real ingenuity; our fairytales can seem like mundane placeholders for more wonderful truths. It was once proposed that storks “wintered on the moon”; we couldn’t have imagined that a mere two centuries later their wings would reveal the key to human fight. No Roman naturalist or German scholastic would have dared suggest swifts fly the equivalent of five times round the Earth every year. The US Navy models underwater missiles on the body shape of bluefin tuna. But biotech is yet to emulate the properties of the golden orb spider’s web, which can last years. The Book of Hopes: Words and Pictures to Comfort, Inspire and Entertain edited by Katherine Rundell I could have done without this chapter because while we are quite remarkable on a biological level, what we choose to do is so abominable that I‘m not a fan of the species per se.

The author, with this book, is trying to woo the reader to be amazed enough to do whatever is necessary to protect the natural world. The problem (in my opinion)? The ones reading books such as this one already know and love the natural world and can do little to change the current status quo. *sighs*Rundell is very strong on the tales humans have told about the natural world. We now know that unicorn horns were actually narwhal tusks, that hedgehogs are lactose intolerant, that drinking bats’ blood does not make you invisible. But we are still making mistakes, and we still know very little. Take the Somali golden mole, whose entry on the International Union for Conservation of Nature list says “data deficient” because “we do not know what shares the world with us, and in what numbers”. The titular Golden Mole section was the shortest one but seemed to focus on the moles rather than loads of forays into fictional asides. The sections did get less filler-y towards the end, but that wasn’t enough to save it for me. One problem of course is animal tourism. I personally never want to see the mountain gorillas close up - I want them to live their lives in peace. But still people must go on safari and can’t see the harm in getting close to wild animals just to take a nice picture and make ‘Ooooo’ noises. But as Rundell says in the chapter on bats ‘in many thousand ways we whittle away at their numbers for our delight.’