Vanishing Treasures with Katherine Rundell

Summary

Podcast Summary: Here's Where It Gets Interesting – "Vanishing Treasures with Katherine Rundell"

Introduction

In the December 9, 2024 episode of Here's Where It Gets Interesting, host Sharon McMahon engages in a captivating conversation with Katherine Rundell, the acclaimed author of Vanishing Treasures: Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures. This episode delves into the fascinating and often overlooked stories of endangered animals, blending history, culture, and urgent conservation messages to inspire listeners to become more informed and thoughtful stewards of the natural world.

Katherine Rundell and Vanishing Treasures

Sharon begins by expressing her admiration for Katherine's work, highlighting her love for animals and the unique, whimsical approach Katherine takes in her book. Katherine shares the inspiration behind Vanishing Treasures, emphasizing her upbringing in Zimbabwe and the profound connection she developed with wildlife from an early age. She describes her first encounter with a pangolin as a pivotal moment that ignited her passion for raising awareness about lesser-known endangered species.

"I wanted to say there is so much out there that we risk losing before we have even begun to understand the scope and sweep of its complexity, intelligence, beauty." [06:00]

The Enigmatic Pangolin

One of the first animals discussed is the pangolin, often referred to as the "scaly anteater." Katherine explains the pangolin's unique physical features and behaviors, portraying it as a creature that embodies ancient beauty with its heavy armor and polite demeanor.

"They have the body shape of an anteater, but the armor that you would imagine, perhaps of a crocodile or a snake, and the face of, like, an unusually polite academic." [04:00]

Katherine highlights the pangolin's plight as the most trafficked animal in the world, driven by human desires for traditional medicine and as a delicacy. She poignantly contrasts the pangolin's natural defensive mechanisms with the unintended consequences of human interference.

American Wood Frog: Nature’s Marvel

Sharon shares her personal experiences with the American wood frog, marveling at its incredible ability to survive winter by freezing solid and then spontaneously restarting its heart in spring.

"We don't know how the wood frog knows exactly the right moment to restart its heart and they all do it." [10:08]

Katherine draws parallels to other animal behaviors, underscoring the vastness of human ignorance about the natural world's complexities.

Greenland Shark: A Living Time Capsule

The conversation shifts to the Greenland shark, Earth's oldest vertebrate. Katherine elaborates on the groundbreaking science that revealed these sharks can live for up to 512 years, making them contemporaries of historical figures like Shakespeare.

"There would be a shark who is alive today who was alive alongside Shakespeare." [16:00]

Sharon reflects on the profoundness of such longevity, contemplating the insignificance of human daily concerns in the grand tapestry of natural history.

Raccoons: Clever and Persistent

Sharon shares a personal anecdote about living with wild raccoons, illustrating their intelligence and tenacity. Katherine responds with fascination, recounting historical accounts of raccoons and their cognitive abilities, such as solving the Aesop's Fable-inspired Stone Task.

"I long to see one. They're quite cute, their beauty, those banded faces." [29:32]

They discuss the challenges of cohabiting with such intelligent creatures and the broader implications for human-wildlife interactions.

Bears: Symbols of Strength and Vulnerability

The discussion moves to bears, exploring why humans are particularly enamored with them. Katherine attributes this to the contrasting qualities of bear cubs' sweetness and the formidable power of adult bears.

"The extraordinary strength and power of the adult bear... their extraordinary ferocity." [33:22]

Sharon muses on the duality of bears in human culture, from beloved Disney characters to symbols of wildness and resilience.

Narwhals: Mythical Yet Real

Katherine and Sharon delve into the enigmatic narwhal, often mistaken for a mythical creature akin to a unicorn. Katherine shares historical anecdotes about narwhals being confused with unicorn horns and discusses their unique biological features.

"The tusks are shot through with around 10 million nerve endings... perhaps cartographers." [43:53]

They highlight the narwhal's mysterious behaviors and the challenges in studying these elusive marine animals.

Conservation Urgency: A Call to Action

As the conversation nears its conclusion, Katherine delivers a powerful message on conservation. She compares humanity's role to "Noah's ark in reverse," emphasizing the rapid decline of wildlife and the urgent need for active, passionate conservation efforts.

"No human can save everything, but every human can save something." [49:58]

Katherine outlines what fighting for the natural world entails, advocating for political engagement, lifestyle changes, and a collective, fervent love for nature.

Gandalf’s Call to Action

Towards the end, Sharon references Gandalf's famous line, "You shall not pass," using it as a metaphor for the determined fight against environmental destruction. Katherine interprets this as a call to brace for a challenging struggle, emphasizing resilience and unwavering commitment.

"The time to give up is never." [50:43]

Conclusion

Sharon wraps up the episode by praising Katherine's beautifully written work and its ability to spark "brain tingle" moments—those exhilarating instances of newfound knowledge that inspire sharing and advocacy. She encourages listeners to explore Vanishing Treasures and support conservation efforts, reinforcing the episode's central theme of cherishing and protecting the world's vanishing treasures.

"This book is full of them and I am so grateful, grateful for your time today." [52:26]

Final Thoughts

This episode of Here's Where It Gets Interesting masterfully combines storytelling, scientific insight, and passionate advocacy to shed light on endangered species that deserve more attention. Through engaging dialogue and poignant reflections, Sharon McMahon and Katherine Rundell inspire listeners to appreciate the intricate wonders of the natural world and take meaningful action to preserve them for future generations.

Transcript

[Sharon McMahon]

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[Sharon McMahon]

Hello friends, welcome. Delighted to have you with me today. My guest is Katherine Rundle and oh my gosh, this conversation is just just the sound of Catherine's voice. You're gonna love it. Catherine is the author of Vanishing Treasures and this is a conversation about one of my favorite topics, animals. Why can't I have just an all animal podcast? I ask you? I'm wondering why not. Today's episode is just a delight, so let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon and here's where it gets interesting. Thank you for being here.

[Katherine Rundle]

Thank you so much for having me. It's such a delight.

[Sharon McMahon]

We are chatting from across the pond as some people say and when I first saw your book it was like an immediate add to cart for me. Anybody who has been listening to me for any period of time knows that I love animals. And you know I could have like a whole podcast just related to animals, but your book Vanishing Treasures Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures caught my eye right away. And it has this sort of, like, in addition to talking about animals, it has this sort of fanciful whimsy aspect to it. And I'm curious about how you even conceptualized writing a book of this nature.

[Katherine Rundle]

So it began a long time ago. I grew up partly in Zimbabwe, and I was very lucky to have a childhood very intimately engaged with living things. You know, snakes in the garden and scorpions under the rocks and occasionally in your shoe and monkeys down by the shopping center. But I used to go back to visit some of my family who still lived there. And while I was there, I went to see, at a wildlife reserve, a pangolin. And it was truly a kind of coup de fruge. It was one of the most extraordinary things that I've ever seen in my life. It was spectacular. But then when I got home to England and I tried to tell people about this extraordinary living thing I had seen, the vast majority of people had never heard of a pangolin.

[Sharon McMahon]

Yeah, exactly. What is a pangolin? People are definitely gonna be like, what is that?

[Katherine Rundle]

Right? So a pangolin is like a scaly anteater. They have the body shape of an anteater, but the armor that you would imagine, perhaps of a crocodile or a snake, and the face of, like, an unusually polite academic. And they are exquisitely beautiful. They walk sort of on their hind legs with their forelegs knitted in front of them. And they have a tongue which they keep internally stored in a pouch near their hip, which is as long as their torso. And they have just this exceptional sense of wildness. They are 80 million years old. They have been here long, long before we arrived. And so when I got home and wanted to tell people about this breathtakingly beautiful, strange, living, real thing, nobody could understand what I was talking about. And so the book began as a kind of act of evangelism for the living world. I wanted to say there is so much out there that we risk losing before we have even begun to understand the scope and sweep of its complexity, intelligence, beauty. Pangolins are the most trafficked animal in the world. And their safety net is when they see a predator coming, they will roll themselves into a ball. And if they have a pup, the mother will roll itself around the pup like a sort of Russian nesting doll. And that is a very good defense against a lion or any kind of predator. But, of course, for a human, what they've done is render themselves readily portable. So their defenses are the opposite of defenses against us. And so that's how the project began, with the desire to say Would you look, only look at what is out there. Not just pangolins, but also the strangeness and beauties of things perhaps that we don't understand, always as strange and beautiful, like crows or spiders. I wanted to try to lay out for people in a way that they might find readable some of the beauty and complexity of the parliament of the non human.

[Sharon McMahon]

The parliament of the non human. Pangolins look like little miniature dinosaurs.

[Katherine Rundle]

They do. They look like they would have been alongside dinosaurs because of course they would have.

[Sharon McMahon]

Yes, and I've seen pictures of them. Tell me if this is true or if this was like a staged shot of them carrying their babies around on their tail.

[Katherine Rundle]

This is entirely true. So especially there are many subspecies of pangolin. And some of the tree climbing pangolins can climb up a tree with the pangolin pup hanging on the back of its tail and on the far bit of its back, this extraordinary thing, which as you say, looks like a dinosaur riding a dinosaur. It is exceptional to witness. And again, of course, we all have limited time, we all have limited space in our lives. But I long to ask of people, could you use some of that time in learning about the world that you share the world with? Because I think it is so easy to forget. We are nature. And it is fitting that we therefore understand nature because we are not outside it. We are part of it. We are it.

[Sharon McMahon]

Why, by the way, this is just out of curiosity. Why are pangolins the most trafficked mammal in the world?

[Katherine Rundle]

This is us in our hunger. They are used often in traditional medicine in a lot of Asia, they're a delicacy. And so they are one of the many things that we have endangered through our desire for them, through our consumption. So often when you think about human destruction, you have to remember to nuance it that it is often to do with human desire. We generally have endangered things by our longing either to be close to them, but more often to consume and own them.

[Sharon McMahon]

You mention one of the animals that I'm surrounded with, which is the American wood frog. I live in the woods on a dirt road. You cannot see my house from the road. I can't see any of my neighbors. It's literally just like a little house in the big woods. And in the springtime they have lots of vernal pools in them, there's standing water. And then that of course gets absorbed down into the water table, into the aquifers and all these kinds of things. But in springtime they're called around here spring peepers, which is that when the frogs wake up from their hibernation, they all sing together at dusk, thousands of them. And the noise that they make, they're singing is quite loud, taking in combination with each other. And you certainly can't see thousands of frogs, but you're very acutely aware in the early spring that they have awakened from their winter slumber. And you even mention this right in the introduction. You say the American wood frog gets through winter by allowing itself to freeze solid. And this is so interesting. We think of, like hibernation as something like bears do. We find like a cozy den and we curl up and we take a little nap. But we think of it in the terms of human sleep. Right? Like I'm just going to sleep an extra long time, like a bear does. But this idea, you say that its heart slows and then stops al together, the water around its organs turns to ice, and then come spring, it thaws and the heart kickstarts itself spontaneously into life. And you mentioned, like, science does know why. How does that work?

[Katherine Rundle]

We don't know how the wood frog knows exactly the right moment to restart its heart and they all do it.

[Sharon McMahon]

At the same time. Catherine, extraordinary.

[Katherine Rundle]

Have you ever seen one of the frozen ones? I never have.

[Sharon McMahon]

Yes. Oh, yes. In addition to being surrounded by the woods, we also have ponds in my yard. One of my daughter's hobbies is frogs. So I'm like almost too acutely aware of the life cycle of frogs. But, yes, how they know to restart their own heart at the same time is very curious.

[Katherine Rundle]

These things are extraordinary in the same way that, you know, we don't really fully understand how birds know the route to fly south through the winter. We think it's to do with the gravitational pull of the Earth, but we don't know. There is such a colossal burgeoning of things that we do not know. And I spend a lot of my time because I have a fellowship at Oxford with scientists and the things are always so eager to tell you is human knowledge is a miraculous thing. We know so much. Our knowledge has been hard won, but we barely know enough to brush the very edges of the beginning of a percentage of the truth of the living world.

[Sharon McMahon]

Yeah, you know, we talked a little bit before we started recording about the work of people like Ed Young and his book Un Immense World, which is about the science of animal senses. He says the exact same thing. We don't even know what we don't know yet. And that is part of what is both incredibly beautiful and also slightly heartbreaking in that the Potential for all of this knowledge, the potential to know things that we don't even know about is disappearing if we don't do something to stop some of what has been happening to the natural world. So I'm curious how you chose the subjects in your book.

[Katherine Rundle]

So the criteria for inclusion of the sort of 20 something animals in the book was a species or a subspecies was endangered. But that narrows it down. Almost, not at all. Almost every animal has a species or subspecies that is endangered or threatened with imminent endangerment. And so it was often based around the idea of a story that I thought might seize people. I wanted to offer something that would root itself under your skin. Like the idea that a giraffe once walked into Paris and ate rose petals from the hands of the king of France and was made a fleur de lis raincoat. I want that to be something that people know that the minute that giraffe arrived, the entirety of Paris went giraffe mad, because they knew there was something in giraffes that is so extraordinary that it required madness. So people had giraffe wallpaper, giraffe soap, giraffe dresses. Women would make their hair into towers to resemble the giraffes horns, their oticones. And they were so towering, their hair that they would have to sit on the floor of their carriages rather than on the seats, because their hair wouldn't otherwise get through the door. I wanted to offer stories of the way that we have adored the world. And then I also wanted to offer stories of the way we have destroyed the world and stories of the way we have misunderstood it. The way that the wonderful Pliny the Elder in the year 70 was writing. The Natural History is the first ever encyclopedia, and he posits that the way that hedgehogs feed their young is by rolling in fruit like grapes or strawberries, and then running away with it to their burrows, which may or may not be in trees, like sort of 1970s cocktail sticks. And that was one of the things that we believed for a long time. And I wanted also to offer ideas of biological, extraordinary, miraculous nature of the living world. The idea that a swift can sleep on the wing, fly in its lifetime, 2 million kilometers, enough to get to the moon and back twice and then once more to the moon. And the idea that when they want to wash, they find rain clouds and fly through them slowly with their wings outstretched to get rid of the dust of the journey. These things I think we should know about if we are to stand truly on the earth that we share with them.

[Sharon McMahon]

I'm very curious about the Greenland shark. I'm curious about all the animals in this book, and this is one of the reasons I really loved it. First of all, it's very beautifully written. You can see that you have a sense for the poetic just in the manner in which you speak. But each of these sort of portraits of these vanishing treasures is very approachable, fascinating. You're not reading, you know, a thousand pages on the Greenland shark. You're offering us almost like an appetizer on which to snack, and it kind of leaves you wanting more. And then you are moving on to the next beautiful portrait, but the Greenland shark, Earth's oldest vertebrate. How scientists even began to be able to ascertain how old Greenland sharks are, how long they can live, that in and of itself is kind of a really interesting feat of science. Can you share with us how do we know how old this animal is?

[Katherine Rundle]

So this is extraordinary, and it's a fairly recent piece of science, that there is a radioactive isotope called carbon 14, which is found in the Earth, and there are huge spikes of it according to historical happenings like nuclear weapons. And you can use it to carbon date the lens crystallines in the shark's eye. And so they tested a number of sharks, and the largest of the sharks, a female, was found to be around 270 to 512 years old. So there's a big gap there, but we think that size is a good indicator of age. And this shark that they tested was 16ft. But Greenland sharks can grow up to 23ft. So they concluded that it seems very possible that there are sharks currently swimming today who are in their sixth century, which would mean that there would be a shark who is alive today who was alive alongside Shakespeare. And the idea that they have swum and swum 1 above. Whole civilizations have been built and burned and built again. And the shark continues. I find that an extraordinary thought, that there is a shark in the water today whose parents would have lived alongside Boccaccio and its great grandparents, alongside Julius Caesar.

[Sharon McMahon]

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[Jenna Fischer]

And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends and together we have the podcast Office Ladies where we rewatched every single episode episode of the Office with insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests and lots of laughs.

[Katherine Rundle]

Guess who's sitting next to me?

[Sharon McMahon]

Steve in the studio.

[Jenna Fischer]

Every Wednesday we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the Office and our friendship with brand new guests and we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Lady Single 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus on Mondays we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts.

[Unknown]

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[Sharon McMahon]

The best word that comes to mind is that it's awful. Not awful in the sense of bad, but like in the sense of full of awe. It makes you feel like almost beautifully insignificant in the world in that I am but one tiny creature that has such a finite lifespan and the idea that there are like 600 year old sharks just swimming slowly, very slowly around the ocean. They're not really edible. They're not things that humans are that interested in. They live in places where there aren't a lot of Humans. Just the idea that there's this 600 year old animal swimming very slowly around the world's cold water, it just makes you feel like, dang. Maybe the fact that my child didn't want to wear a coat to school this morning and we had an argument about whether or not it's too cold to wear a coat or not, you're like, maybe my problems are really rather insignificant. Do you ever feel that way, Catherine, where you are learning about these things and you're like, well, who am I?

[Katherine Rundle]

All the time. All the time. And I think this is the great benefit they can give us. I think if we could learn to think of ourselves as humans, as. As miraculous thinkers extraordinary in our capacities both for destruction and for creation, but also one of a great parliament in which we are only one constituency. A shark born today, if we allow it, will live far beyond anything that you or I can accurately imagine. And they live so deep down, they live 7,000ft, so sort of seven Eiffel Towers down where it is cold and dark. And at that depth there is life that we don't even suspect. Life that we cannot imagine. And I think sometimes it is worth sitting and closing your eyes and imagining not just all the people going about their lives loving and endeavoring and destroying, but also the extraordinary plethora of beating hearts of life, all of which have forms of knowledge that we cannot even begin to fathom because we are very poor at imagining knowledges other than our own. I find it profoundly liberating from the confines of our moment.

[Sharon McMahon]

I totally get what you're saying. In the Greenland Shark chapter, you say, I'm glad to not be a Greenland shark. I don't have enough thoughts to fill 500 years, but I find the very idea of them hopeful. They will see us pass through whichever spinning chaos we may currently be living through and the crash that will come after it. And they will live through the currently unimagined things that will come after that. The transformations, the revelations, the possible liberations. That is their beauty. And it's breathtaking. They go on. I just think that's very profound to think about that. They just continue.

[Katherine Rundle]

They do. I wrote that a couple of years ago. And of course now I would add a very strong caveat. They go on is we do not make it impossible for them to do so because we could fill the water with such noise that communication becomes impossible and with such pollutants that life becomes impossible. We could end up with a world in which the seas are almost empty and the skies are almost Silent. And so I think when we think about love, we have to think about it as something that needs increasingly to be active and furious. Just an angry, raging love seems to me to be the thing that is called for.

[Sharon McMahon]

Now, you talk about in your book, too, about raccoons. And I have an interesting raccoon story to share with you if you're interested.

[Katherine Rundle]

I'm never not interested in raccoon stories.

[Sharon McMahon]

You talk about an interesting one from history, about the raccoon that lived in the White House. And that is an interesting story. I like it. But I used to have a raccoon that lived in my house. Oh, well, not a pet. Not as a pet. A wild raccoon that lived in my house. I used to live in a very old house. Certainly not old by some of Great Britain's standards, but old by American standards. Over 100 years old. And one night we were lying awake in bed, just kind of drifting off to sleep, and we heard what sounded like a very bizarre noise that one could not pinpoint. And it sounded a little like. Almost like a cartoon yelling at you from the other side of the wall. That's the best way I can describe it. And then it was coupled by very distinctive sounds of scratching and walking and then just kind of this, like, thump, thump, thump. Well, it was very obvious that there was something inside the walls. And soon it became very obvious that there was more than one something in the attic. And each night these somethings would return from their daily sojourns to their cozy home in the attic of my house. And we figured out where they were getting in and attempted to during the day. Like, we called an expert. And they were like, you need to block off their entrance during the day so you don't trap them in your house. You want them to come back and realize, like, oh, no, I can't get in there anymore. Well, guess what? That did not work. They just found a different way in. It did not work even a little bit. It didn't even work for one night. They found a different way in. But then one day we came home and there was no electricity on only the second floor of my house. Not on the main level, only on the second floor. So we called an electrician to come fix the electricity on the second floor of the house. And the electrician opens up the little door to the attic. He pops that open, gets a ladder, and is immediately met by a very angry raccoon.

[Katherine Rundle]

Oh, no.

[Sharon McMahon]

Who does not want the electrician in her space around her babies. So as one can imagine Raccoon mommies are protective of their young. And the electrician immediately closed it and was like, nope, I will not be fixing your electricity today. So the question then became like, what does one do with the raccoons? Because we don't want them destroying our home, which is what they will do given the opportunity. They're not a respecter of human residences.

[Katherine Rundle]

No. They eat your electrical cords as a hobby. Absolutely.

[Sharon McMahon]

But neither do we want to harm them. Right. So we called a wildlife expert, decided that we would humanely live, trap them, and relocate them to another location. Like, we would not harm them. We would just catch them and then move them somewhere else. So we did that. We live trapped them again. They were not injured, and we drove them far, far away. I'm talking many miles. Not far away, like a park down the street. I'm talking, like, 10 miles. And wouldn't you know it, within the week they were back, they found their way home. And I won't belabor this story, but we never fully rid our house of raccoons. We lived there for 10 years, and when we sold the house, we told the new buy, there are raccoons that live here now and then. And the new buyer was like, well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. And I'm friends with the new owner on Facebook, and the new owner has frequently posted about the raccoons that she shares the house with. She's just come to the conclusion that there's just no way to get rid of them. They're too opportunistic, and they're too wedded. Apparently, they're very wedded to their place of birth. They remember where they were born. This is a safe place for me. This is where I want to be. And then, of course, if you have a mother who has two babies and then those babies go on to have two babies, suddenly you have 15 raccoons who all believe they need to live in your house. All of them. This is my house. So I now live in the woods where I have no raccoons. But in town, I had plenty of raccoons. I don't know what to make of that. Why do you all need to live with me? But the sound of, like, it's very distinctive, and you do become accustomed to it over time. I will say, have you ever lived with a raccoon, Catherine?

[Katherine Rundle]

I have never seen a raccoon. I am.

[Jenna Fischer]

You've never seen a raccoon?

[Katherine Rundle]

I can see the logistical difficulty of living alongside them because their intelligence makes them so difficult to peacefully cohabit with. They can open rabbit hatches and dustbins and window latches. They can unlock doors if you leave the key and. But I long to see one. They're quite cute, their beauty, those banded faces.

[Sharon McMahon]

Yes.

[Katherine Rundle]

And also that sense of extraordinary inquisitiveness that they have. Although I can see that being a householder with a raccoon as a tenant is not ideal. I do think that, like, you know, the things they can do. The book talks about how there's a famous thing called the Aesop test, which is a cylinder with a marshmallow floating on water too far down to reach by grabbing. And the raccoons are shown a human who drops stones into the water to raise the level of the water so that you can then snatch the marshmallow. And several raccoons who had been shown this were able to replicate it immediately. And another one of them just knocked it over, which no other animal thought of. I find their ingenuity and their beauty very compelling, Even though I can see that as a bedfellow or indeed a wall fellow, they might not be ideal.

[Sharon McMahon]

They're little human hands. Their hands appear so human and dexterous, and then they have very expressive little faces. And if they weren't viewed as nuisance animals in the United States, you can see why somebody would even want one as a pet, because they're charming and they're smart and they're floofy and they're cute. And, you know, we keep all kinds of other animals that fall in that genre. As Peter pets. That's a lot of dogs. Except raccoons are apparently even smarter.

[Katherine Rundle]

Seem to have better memories.

[Sharon McMahon]

Yeah, Human little hands where they can, like, make all kinds of things happen. They make dogs seem like giant dopes in comparison. You know, like, we're dog. All we have is our nose to, like, boop things with and our little paws to smack things around. And we're really motivated by a treat. We're very easy to get. We could just be distracted by a treat. Raccoons don't care about your treats. Right.

[Katherine Rundle]

They are their own being. And of course, we know that, famously, the Coolidge administration. Calvin Coolidge had a pet raccoon, and it lived in the house and had a beautiful embroidered collar and would unscrew the light bulbs and overturn the block pants and play with the soap and used to sit across his shoulders like a sort of muffler. Until one day, we believe she did the thing that many people have longed to do and very few have done. And she Bit the President of America.

[Sharon McMahon]

That was the unforgivable crime. Yes. You know, I love bears as well. And one of the things that amuses me about bears is, and I will frequently on my social media, I will post a clip of a bear doing whatever they want. And I will often post the caption as though I'm attributing a quote to a bear. Like bears, I do what I want. Go ahead and try to stop me. I'm going to do what I want. And if I want to swing on your porch swing, I'm going to. And if I want to lay on a floaty in your pool, I'm going to, you know, like, there's nothing a bear can't do if it decides that's what it wants to do. I do what I want. I would love to hear. What do you think it is about bears that humans in particular are so enamored by? Why do we love bears so much more than other furry creatures? Because, like we just mentioned, raccoons are extremely charming, extremely smart. Cute little faces, cute little hands. What is it about bears that humans love so much?

[Katherine Rundle]

I think it must be that fabulous contrast between the extraordinary sweetness of the cubs and the extraordinary beauty of their faces and that kind of Disney like, colossal eye of a bear cub and the extraordinary strength and power of the adult bear. And we have, as you say, we have loved them for so long. For a while there was this fabulous theory, which I love, that was very much in fashion at the time that I mostly study, which is Renaissance England, where we believed that a mother bear gave birth to a lump of unformed flesh and then licked it into shape. And so there's a Dunn poem where he says, you know, love's a bare whelp born if we o'erlich our love and force it new strange shapes to take we are and of a lump a monster make. And I love this idea. And then their extraordinary ferocity. In England, we used to have bear baiting down in the sort of slightly lawless area near the globe where you would find prostitutes and people selling very strong drink. There you would also find the bear. And Byron had a bear in his rooms at Trinity College. And when he was asked what he was going to do with it, he said that he thought it should sit for a fellowship.

[Unknown]

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[Sharon McMahon]

You say in the book that bears are a species of large and capacious astonishments. The Kodiak brown bear is a prodigy of growth at birth. A cub weighs less than a pound, a small loaf of bread, but can end by weighing more than 1500 pounds. If we grew at the same rate, an adult man would weigh the same as a rhinoceros. And their sense of smell is a hundred times better than ours. A polar bear can smell you more than 18 miles off and swim 100 miles without stopping to rest. England to France five times over without pause. Swimming 100 miles without resting, that is banana. The Greenland shark doesn't even do that right, you know, like. And that's not a warm blooded mammal. Do you ever, you know, learn these facts about animals and just think to yourself, how?

[Katherine Rundle]

Constantly. And it is a constant refrain. I think for all the scientists who are working on the living world, the thing they constantly say is, so rarely do we discover that we have overestimated a living thing. Almost always we discover that it is more complex, more nuanced. Its intelligence, its senses are sharper and stranger. It is always more than we thought and we are discovering now how much more. And yes, the process of writing this book over several years was just a process over and over again of how, how can a bear do that? How can they be so swift, so colossal? How does a spider know the difference on a television screen between a rainforest and the Real Housewives? But they do. You can teach a seal how to speak English. There's a seal who speaks with like a strong main accent, not anymore, but in the 1970s because he was adopted as a baby by a human. And there are recordings that you can Google and find. And the accent is really very strong. And it says, hello there, get over here. And it sounds exactly like a slightly disgruntled man in his 60s. I think writing the book, what I wanted to do was just try to lay out kneeling in front of someone and pouring into their lap just this cornucopia of wonders. In the hope that one of them will get under your seat skin. In the hope that a little bit of it might, in a kind of Trojan Horse way. Because I wanted to write the book to be short. All of the pieces, they're never longer than about two and a half thousand words. And they would always start at about six. And I would whittle and whittle down and down on the hope that you could read them at one go in a sitting. And the hope would be that maybe it might Trojan horse its way into your consciousness and just remind you that we are not alone. And it behoves us to act in a way that honors that Fact, I always say that I slightly wrote the book for people perhaps who do not believe in the urgency of the need for conservation. You, Sharon, you are, I am preaching to the converted. But there are those for whom it feels like a secondary or not even close to secondary concern. And I don't know how you galvanize in someone a sense of urgency, but I think one possible way of all the many ways, might be adoration, might be astonishment, might be insisting on a Wanda that is educated and engaged and adoring and angry.

[Sharon McMahon]

I love that. Have you discovered this phenomenon that many people do not know that narwhals are real?

[Katherine Rundle]

I numb this.

[Sharon McMahon]

I did not know that people did not know that. And so I periodically will post and this is no joke on my Instagram. I have 1.2 million followers on Instagram. I will be like, this is your quarterly reminder that narwhals are in fact real and not mythical creatures. I think we have become so accustomed to seeing narwhals on children's clothing, on stuffed animals, on the movie Elf, in which the narwhals are, bye, buddy, hope you find your dad. And he's like Claymation. And we never see them on our whale watching excursions because we're not whale watching in the Arctic, obviously. But North Americans, even most Canadian North Americans, would never have occasion to see a narwhal in the wild. And so they have been relegated to this, like, mythical creature status for many people. And very much like a unicorn, you know, the unicorn of the sea. Unicorns on land are mythical. And the number of people who are like, I am 37 years old, and I just learned today that narwhals are in fact, real. Is this a worldwide problem? Katherine?

[Katherine Rundle]

I was telling a friend about the narwhal, a friend who is a professor at Oxford University of Philosophy, and he admitted that he, up until that moment, he's in his 40s, had fully believed that narwhals were very much like the Almiraj, which is a horned hare, or the Ratatoska, which is a horned squirrel based in batch, maybe like Norse mythology, not understanding that they are, are of course real. But of course, the extraordinary thing is there has always been slippage. Queen Elizabeth the first was given a narwhal horn studded in emeralds and rubies, and she was told it was a horn of the unicorn of the ocean. And at around the same time, about 80 years before, an Italian scholar was writing that he had seen a real unicorn, a land unicorn, in the Sinai Desert with a horn a meter long. So there was always a sense of possibility.

[Sharon McMahon]

There's always this sense of possibility, but yet not in the modern era, apparently. We've just decided that's not real. This is so fascinating. People ask me when I tell them they are real, they're like, how does the tusk get out of its mother? You know, they don't realize that it grows after the baby is born and that it's actually like a tooth that grows through its lip. And you say in the book, too, that scientists have found that the tusk is shot through with around 10 million nerve endings, and by rubbing tusks on meeting the narwhals may be passing on information about the salinity and therefore propensity to freeze of the water through which they have just passed. And you say perhaps the tusks make them not aggressors, but cartographers. What a thought that animals mapped the globe in their own way. Isn't that just such a fascinating thing to think about?

[Katherine Rundle]

Extraordinary. The idea that we who understand time and space in our specific way live alongside those who also understand the idea of map making in a completely different way, but yet with the same need. They too need to know the ocean as it dies. And so it does seem possible we don't know that's what they're for because, of course not solely, but largely it's just the males that grow them. You do sometimes see a narwhal striking a fish and then once it's stunned, going to pick it up and eat it more readily, so that maybe it's multipurpose again. It falls into that colossal basket of things that we do not fully know.

[Sharon McMahon]

And they're difficult animals to study because you can't keep them in captivity and run experiments on them the way you can with a raccoon or a bird. And they live in such remote places. Very, very difficult animals to learn things about, but yet still very real.

[Katherine Rundle]

Their beauty is the beauty of the real world. They look exactly right for something that lives deep, dark down.

[Sharon McMahon]

Well, I want to keep talking because I want to go through every single animal in this book and I want to talk about it. Do you experience this, Catherine, where when you have learned something fascinating, it brings you a tremendous amount of pleasure to share with somebody about that thing I do.

[Katherine Rundle]

It makes me difficult to live with because of my desire to grab my partner's wrist and say, did you know that possibly it was a coconut crab that ate Amelia Earhart? And the idea that once you have Learned something. The thing you most urgently want to do is pass it on to another person. And my hope would be that if one person might read the book, then maybe they would pass on five of the real and imagined truths and half truths of the living world that we have lived alongside. Maybe they'll pass those on about the fact that the narwhal is real, leaving our past that on. And, you know, one hopes for the possibility always of a ripple effect. One doesn't always get them, but they are possible.

[Sharon McMahon]

You say in the book, and I think this is a somewhat sobering but important way to end this conversation, you say we are Noah's ark in reverse and you're referencing how the world's wildlife has declined by almost 70 in the last 50 years. You say it is as if we are raging through the bowels of the boat, setting fire to the stables, poisoning the water. Faced with such destruction at such pace, acquiescence becomes impossible and the time to fight with all our ingenuity and tenacity, with love and fury is now. What do you hope will happen as a result of writing this book? What does fighting with love and fury for the natural world look like, if you can?

[Katherine Rundle]

It looks like engaging in politics at every possible level, the local, the national, not just in one vote every four or five years. It looks like protest. It looks like remembering that some things that we treat as normal have only been normal for 150 years. Eating meat every day, flying everywhere. Those are habits we have learned swiftly and could unlearn. It looks like trying to be a member of the community who tries to push forward visions of play, luxury, leisure, delight that don't involve the relentless consumption of new things. I think it looks like building a kind of no passerin, they shall not pass for your own soul. I think it looks like not giving in to a vision of the world that is exploitative or authoritarian or militaristic. I think it looks like insisting on hope, not passive hope, not the hope where you sit alone in your room and you think maybe everything will be okay. Everything will not be okay. The hope that is active, that is a discipline. The hope that says despair is something we have no time for. No human can save everything, but every human can save something. I think that is what it will look like, like every possible fight we can offer. I think now the next crucial 10 years will be the time to offer it.

[Sharon McMahon]

I love that, that no human can save everything, but every human can save something. And speaking of you shall not pass, which of course is a famous Gandalf quote from the Fellowship of the Ring where Gandalf says, you cannot pass. And he's saying this to the Orcs that are standing in his path. He says, I am a servant of the Secret Fire. And of course, people have like over the years, many interpretations of what that means. I would love to know what that means to you, Katherine, if it means anything at all. What does it mean to be in this moment, Gandalf, you shall not pass. What does that mean to you?

[Katherine Rundle]

I think to me it means that we must brace ourselves for a fight that will be so hard, actively dangerous potentially. But also, I think over and over and over, there is a great temptation to say, well, given the now political landscape that we have, the disinformation, the power of fossil fuel companies, maybe now it is the time to say, well, we've lost, we'll give up. We'll have a gorgeous time, we'll party, because it will make no difference. And the thing is, that's not how the world works. That's not how the future works. We cannot know in advance what will make a difference. And so the thing I tell myself over and over every day, the time to give up is never.

[Sharon McMahon]

I love that we could keep talking, but I'm going to let you go for today and I really appreciate you. I appreciate your time. I really loved reading Vanishing Treasures. This is such a beautifully written sort of love story to the natural world. If you're somebody who enjoys those sort of what I call brain tingle moments where you're like, I did not know that. And it gives you like a singular pleasure to share facts with your partner or your children or the lady behind the counter at the doctor's office. This book is full of them and I am so grateful, grateful for your time today. Thank you so much, Kim.

[Katherine Rundle]

Thank you so much for having me.

[Sharon McMahon]

You can buy Vanishing Treasures wherever you buy your books. If you want to support your local bookshop, head to yours or go to bookshop.org thank you so much for listening to. Here's where it gets interesting. If you enjoyed today's episode, would you consider sharing or subscribing to this show that helps podcasters out so much? I'm your host and executive producer, Sharon McMahon. Our supervising producer is Melanie Buck Parks and our audio producer is Craig Thompson. We'll see you soon.