Peter’s Square in the early hours before the pope arrives for Easter Mass, when vandal gulls swoop in to destroy the elaborate floral display. Intrepid as ever, she travels from leopard-terrorized hamlets in the Indian Himalaya to St. Roach tags along with animal-attack forensics investigators, human-elephant conflict specialists, bear managers, and danger tree faller blasters. These days, as New York Times best-selling author Mary Roach discovers, the answers are best found not in jurisprudence but in science: the curious science of human-wildlife conflict, a discipline at the crossroads of human behavior and wildlife biology. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Intrepid, witty, and elucidating, best-selling Roach is an ongoing popular-science supernova.What’s to be done about a jaywalking moose? A bear caught breaking and entering? A murderous tree? Three hundred years ago, animals that broke the law would be assigned legal representation and put on trial. Roach writes splendidly about the often-surprising challenges inherent in coexisting with other animals in their natural habitats. Unusual terminology pops up, such as snarge (remains of birds scraped off an airplane), frass (insect excreta), and murmuration (a mass of birds flying in shape-shifting flocks). She also reviews various remedies for problematic animals and notes that killing wildlife doesn’t work as damage control-nature finds a way to compensate. Roach accompanies investigators on the human-animal beat all over the world and explains their use of forensic science, DNA testing and GPS collars, scat examination, and humane methods of trapping and exterminating.

Featured creatures include California mountain lions, bears, wild elephants, leopards, white-tailed deer, thieving birds, macaques, mice, and rats. But Roach observes that animals are following their instincts, not committing crimes. Some offenses are quite serious (manslaughter, assault, home invasion), others less heinous (vandalizing, robbery, littering).

In Fuzz, she entertainingly investigates “the intractable nature of human-wildlife conflict.” (Think Amy Schumer narrating Nature on PBS.) About 2,000 species regularly perpetrate actions that disturb or harm human beings. In her previous adventurous books, Roach has explored the science of peculiar and familiar subjects ranging from human cadavers to life in space.

Mary roach fuzz review