Welcome to the Sort Of Funny Field Guides email!
It's about birds, and bugs, and fuzz-butts. You're gonna love it.
Hello from your friendly neighborhood spider-man!
Of course, as a science journalist who writes about animals for a living, I’m also honored to be your friendly neighborhood raccoon-man, rattlesnake-man, and yellow-bellied-sapsucker-man.
What I mean to say is I’m obsessed with learning about animals. So much so, I’m writing a book about them for National Geographic. It’s tentatively titled Sort Of Funny Field Guides: North American Wildlife, and it’s due out in Spring of 2025.
Did you know, for instance, that opossums are pregnant for just 13 days? Or that deer antlers are actually temporary, disposable, face organs that can grow at a rate of nearly an inch every 24 hours? Or that the skunk is just one of around four dozen mammal species capable of discharging noxious-smelling, anti-predator liquid from its backside?
That’s right, weasels, foxes, cacomistles, aardwolves, short-eared dogs, civets, and badgers all possess chemical weapons, too! If you want to learn more about all of that, here’s a silly little video I did for #InverteButtWeek.
At the end of the day, I’m a science writer with a thing for weird animals. Nine years ago, I quit my job in advertising and started focusing all of my words on endangered species, human-animal conflict, zoonotic diseases, and new biological discoveries. And in that time, I’ve had the privilege to work with some of the best, most-read publications in the world.
I’ve also gotten to eat termites, sniff sloth turds, and interview scientists as they cored brain stems from 55-gallon drums full of wet-rotting deer carcasses. I realize, that may not sound like a dream job to you, but for me, it’s been blackberry pie.
And now I get to do something I’ve dreamed about since I was a kid.
With the Sort Of Funny Field Guides book, I aim to take you on an adventure to learn about some of the absolutely amazing and truly ridiculous animals found in Canada, the United States, and Mexico. I want to teach you about this continent’s most charismatic critters, from Gila monsters and mountain lions to buffalo. But I also want to drive home the fact that Daddy-longlegs, pill-bugs, and freshwater mussels are wildlife, too.
In fact, freshwater mussels are straight-up savages, and I need everyone to know about it.
Of course, it takes a while to write a whole book. And I won’t possibly be able to fit all the cool information I’m learning into it. So let’s start the conversation now with an email where I promise to teach you at least one cool thing about an animal each week. Maybe more. But all of it will be free.
Last thing: If you dig any of this, maybe consider telling just one friend about it. Who knows, they might just learn something fun about bat nipples.