Katherine Rundell is a scholar, a fabulous writer and a born enthusiast. These qualities were on prominent display in Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, published earlier this year. But she is equally famous as an award-winning children’s author, whose books such as The Wolf Wilder are shot through with a deep sense of the strange and often disturbing beauty of other animals. The Golden Mole is a celebration of 22 species, each of which is either endangered or “contains a subspecies that is endangered”.
Some of Rundell’s enthusiasms are surprising. She “did not believe in love at first sight”, she tells us, until she was introduced to a pangolin at a wildlife project in Zimbabwe. Hermit crabs are “off-kilter beautiful: the jewelled anemone crab has shocking emerald eyes, on stalks that are striped like a barber’s pole in red and white. They can be sea-grey or royal purple.”
Even when the book turns to more obviously lovable creatures, it is full of weird and wonderful information. Giraffes “drop into existence a distance of five feet from the womb to the earth” and, within minutes, “can stand on their trembling, catwalk-model legs and suckle at their mother’s four teats, biting off the little wax caps that have formed in the preceding days to keep the milk from leaking out”. They have more homosexual than heterosexual sex and “have been photographed at night with clusters of sleeping birds tucked into their armpits, keeping them dry”. When the French king Charles X was given a giraffe by the ruler of Egypt in 1827, it established a fashion for coiffure à la girafe, as “women smeared their hair with hogs’ lard pomade fragranced with orange flower and jasmine, and wound to resemble the giraffe’s ossicones”.
Rundell’s chapters are never more than eight pages long, but all are full of similarly vivid details about the creatures themselves, the stories we tell about them, the ways we have interacted with them and why they are now endangered. Swifts “mate in brief mid-sky collisions, the only birds to do so, and to wash they hunt down clouds and fly through gentle rain, slowly, wings outstretched”. Jumping spiders have excellent colour vision over a broader spectrum of colour than ours. Put in front of a television, we learn, “some become fixated on nature programmes, more so than by, for instance, prime minister’s questions”.
Few species deserve the bad reputations we sometimes impose on them. Wolves are not “deceptive, ravenous and morally backward” but “simply medium-large predators”, Rundell reminds us, and have been hunted “long after they ceased to be a physical danger to us”. Annual deaths from bear attacks are far fewer than those from “falling televisions, faulty lawn mowers or toppling vending machines”.
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.
Even more disturbingly, Rundell argues that extinction is “not just happening because of our inertia: it’s incentive-driven” – through a ghastly process known as “extinction speculation”. Those who trade in Norwegian shark fin, rare bear bladders, rhino horn and even frozen bluefin tuna would love these species to go extinct, because prices would go through the roof.
When it comes to what we should do, however, things get a bit woolly. After a typically vivid account of seahorse courtship and reproduction, Rundell urges us to “remember the seahorse” every morning and “scream with awe and not stop screaming until we fall asleep” or, a bit more practically, to “refuse to eat anything that is taken from the ocean by overexploitative nonselective fishing”. Elsewhere, she makes the rather vague suggestion that we “urgently seek out ways to aid child nutrition” in impoverished countries, so that people there are not forced to hunt endangered creatures. It is a pity that this element of the book is so thin and impractical. Yet Rundell is incapable of writing a dull sentence and it could hardly be bettered as an exuberant celebration of everything from bats, crows and hedgehogs to narwhals and wombats
The Golden Mole and Other Living Treasure by Katherine Rundell is published by Faber (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
