Black Ops & Beaver Bombing//Fiona Mathews and Tim Kendall - A review by Wayne

"Bats engage in oral sex as a strategy to extend copulation time and improve reproductive success. The book presents this information with complete scientific composure. I however didn't manage the same."

Wayne is the co-founder of Quieter. He started this brand because he spent too long staring at screens and not enough time outside. He is getting the balance a bit better these days.

The title alone will get you looked at on public transport. Read it anyway.

Fiona Mathews and Tim Kendall are a husband and wife team who spent several years travelling Britain looking for its wild mammals. Fiona is a professor of environmental biology at the University of Sussex and the person responsible for the official census of British mammals. Tim is a poet and literary scholar who has spent his life being fascinated by animals and slightly less qualified to talk about them than his wife. The combination works extremely well.

The book is structured simply. Each chapter is a different mammal. Beavers. Pine martens. Water voles. Hedgehogs. Grey seals. Wild boar. Bats. Each one gets its story, its ecology, its current predicament, and the efforts being made to save it. What makes it different from most nature writing is the puns. There are a lot of puns. An inexhaustible supply, as the cover accurately warns. You will groan and continue reading, which is exactly the intended effect.

Worth knowing before you start: Fiona knows what she is talking about in a way that very few writers about nature actually do. She led the first ever Red List Assessment for British mammals. When she tells you that a quarter of them are at imminent risk of extinction this is not journalism. This is the person who counted them. That authority gives the book a weight that the jokes, mercifully, never quite let become crushing.

The facts are genuinely extraordinary. Pine marten droppings smell like Parma Violets, which is either a reason to seek them out or avoid confectionery depending on your perspective. Beavers were reintroduced to Scotland partly via operations so covert that the people involved referred to them using espionage terminology, which is where half the title comes from. The other half you will discover in the bat chapter. There is a section about bat sexual behaviour that you will not forget and will definitely repeat at dinner (I did actually do this as I have the mental age of a 14 year old boy). The short version is that bats engage in oral sex, apparently as a strategy to extend copulation time and improve reproductive success. The book presents this information with complete scientific composure. You will not manage the same.

What makes it more than a collection of extraordinary facts is the underlying anger, worn lightly but consistently. These animals are disappearing. Not abstractly, not in some distant future, but now, measurably, on our watch. Hedgehog numbers have halved since 2000. Water voles have lost 90% of their population in fifty years. The causes are not mysterious. They are the usual eye rolling ones. Habitat loss, pesticides, invasive species, a countryside managed almost entirely for agricultural efficiency. Mathews and Kendall do not rant about this. They just take you to where the animals are, show you how few there are, and trust you to feel the appropriate thing.

The chapter on beavers is the best thing in the book. Beavers were hunted to extinction in Britain by the sixteenth century, primarily for their fur, their meat, and a secretion from their scent glands used in perfume and medicine. They have been absent for five hundred years. They are now back in parts of Scotland, Devon and elsewhere, partly through official reintroduction schemes and partly through the kind of unofficial, nocturnal, don't-ask-too-many-questions operations the title references. Wherever they have returned, the rivers around them have changed. Water slows. Wetlands return. Species that had not been seen for decades reappear. One animal, absent for half a millennium, and the landscape reorganises itself.

By the end something was moved in me. I needed to know more. I wanted to see these animals in the wild. I finished it on a warm evening in Corfu and we went for a walk and kept stopping to look at things I would normally have walked past. I eventually found bats near our apartment. Diving and darting as they hunted for food. It was a spectacle of all things brilliant about the world and to end it all, two Scops Owls "booped" to each other. Thank you Merlin app.

That is what this book does. It does not tell you to care. It just shows you enough that caring becomes unavoidable.

It belongs in the Quiet Library because it is exactly the kind of book that rewards putting the phone down. You cannot skim it. The facts are too good and the humour is too "bad" and both require your full attention. Read it outside if you can.