The humor is apparent in some of the chapter titles in Fuzz—“Maul cops,” “Breaking and Entering and Eating,” and “The Elephant in the Room,” and in this book alone, her extensive travels take her from Aspen, Colorado (bears and garbage) to New Zealand (endangered Yellow-eyed Penguins), to The Vatican ( voracious Herring Gulls). At each stop her conversations with wildlife managers and research scientists revolve around solutions to mitigate human death and damage from native species just doing what they’ve done for eons, trying to survive.
Roach first delves into the “bird problem” in Fuzz with a look at the controversy in the sunflower fields in the Dakotas which lie directly in the path of migrating flocks of blackbirds, starlings, and cowbirds. Spraying with toxins exploded there in 2006 when Frito-Lay decided to fry its potato chips in sunflower oil from a variety that contained no trans fat. But the toxin also kills Ring-necked Pheasants (and cardinals, jays, Barn Owls, etc.), a game bird which brings hundreds of hunters to the state each year.
She presents some actual numbers. Studies have shown there was an average loss of only two percent of the sunflower crop, and killing one or two million blackbirds out of a flock of seventy million was “like trying to solve global warming with an ice machine.” This is just one of the many examples she discovers of how trying to fix one environmental problem may create others, unanticipated and often worse.
Roach has a whole chapter on futile military actions against birds—crow bombing in rural Texas, machine gunning Emus in Australia (yes, really), clubbing Laysan Albatrosses on Midway Island. Nature ultimately prevails, of course, as evidenced by the fact that Naval Air Station Midway is now Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge. She also presents studies done on jet engines ingesting Turkey Vultures and Canada Geese (Capt. Sully in the Hudson River), and there is a fascinating section explaining why “deer in the headlights,” now a well used sports metaphor, originally referred to a well-documented highway hazard.
In her final chapter, “The Disappearing Mouse,” Roach discusses the “scary magic of gene drives” and RNAi. If you’re unfamiliar with the first term, it refers to genetic engineering designed to modify a species, in this case mice, so they produce only male young. RNAi refers to a process in which a species’ mechanism for destroying viral RNA is silenced. The hope in either case is to control invasive species without poisoning the planet, and mice were chosen for this testing because their entire genome was decoded in the early aughts as a tool to understanding the human genome.
What could go wrong? The answer of course is a lot of things, and both Roach and many of the scientists working at the National Wildlife Research Center have “qualms.” This last chapter is a deep dive into the science but is well worth reading twice for the how of these experiments but, more importantly, for the should and the could. Humans have woven a tangled web around this planet. In her book Roach explains how that happened and how it might be fixed, and she does it with facts, humor, and humanity.