"It's often said that knowing more about nature leads to more caring about it." In Close to Home, biologist and John Burroughs Medal-winning natural history writer Thor Hanson (Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid) invites readers to discover the overlooked wonders in their own backyards.
Divided into three parts--Seeing (how to look), Exploring (where to look) and Restoring (how to help)--Close to Home is an accessible read, filled with fascinating facts, stories from the field, and Hanson's own experiences. An entrancing encounter with a Hutton's vireo, a hungry mother raccoon, and a camouflaged nest of eggs led Hanson to his epiphany that "familiarity invites its own revelations" and he soon realized that new discoveries--blooming wild bitter cherry trees and overlooked orchids--followed when he took the long route to a destination.
Close to Home contains inspiring examples of discovery by citizen scientists, such as the recreational scuba divers who found new jewel anemones in Singapore and the more than 40,000 people who have replaced their lawns with native flora, contributing to biodiversity in their neighborhoods. Hanson also shares the "long history of backyard contributions to the study of animal behavior," including discoveries by scientific great and "notorious homebody" Charles Darwin. Many of Darwin's experiments got their start from his daily neighborhood walks. It was there that he found a testing ground for his long-standing fascination with earthworms and made observations which would, eventually become his last published book.
"Humanity's great influence over natural systems gives us a caretaker's duty to safeguard them, and to protect the species that call them home," Hanson declares. This warm and optimistic book gives readers the tools to contribute to this stewardship. --Grace Rajendran, freelance reviewer