In The Kingdom of Rarities, Eric Dinerstein explores rare species and asks some interesting questions, including: Why are so many species rare? Have they always been rare, and, if not, what causes or environmental changes have contributed to rarity? What be done to save rare species? Dinerstein asks “Why, wherever you land, do you always find a few superabundant species and a multitude of rare ones?” While rare species are found everywhere, we really know very little about why this is the case. Are all these rare species are on the brink of extinction or have there always been rare species?

Dinerstein says, "To understand rarity in nature, whether as an artist or a biologist, one of the best places to look is in the tropical belt. The Amazon and Congo basins, Southeast Asia including Sumatra (Indonesia), and New Guinea are the four largest expanses of rain forest; along with some smaller regions, they hold more than 60 percent of the world’s known species—crammed into less than 5 percent of Earth’s surface."

"The island of New Guinea is especially interesting to biologists because so many of its species are found nowhere else." This is especially true of the Foja Mountains in the heart of Papua Province. The Kingdom of Rarities covers Dinerstein's travels, as well as the travels of others, across the world, considering various rare species.

Some of the rarities Dinerstein explores include Birds of paradise, the golden fronted bowerbird, the orange faced honey-eater, the Juan Fernández firecrown hummingbird on an island called Más a Tierra, (Robinson Crusoe Island), Kirtland’s warbler, rhinoceroses, including the greater one-horned rhino, and, in South America, jaguars and pumas, the giant anteater, giant armadillo, and maned wolf.


Factors discussed that influence rarity are extreme habitat specialization, an isolated population (especially if this isolation is geographic), and a changing environment due to outside factors introduced, such as agriculture. “Wholesale conversion of land [to agriculture] not only threatens to make no small number of common species rare through human activity,it also threatens the very existence of what is now rare.”

Eric Dinerstein is Chief Scientist with the World Wildlife Fund, where he has spent the past 24 years working to save rare species globally. Certainly this gives him the insight and experience to consider the question of rarities across the world. Dinerstein does a superb job discussing the question in a manner that will capture the attention of a lay person as well as a professional. He includes illustrations, maps, annotated bibliography, and index. The Kingdom of Rarities is a fascinating, entertaining, thought provoking book.

Very Highly Recommended

Disclosure: My advanced reading copy Kindle edition was courtesy of Island Press and Netgalley for review purposes.
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Average

Dinerstein is fascinated by rarity and what purpose/meaning it has in nature. Some creatures are "naturally" rare, others we have made rare and this book explores a number of such creatures and their habitats. I found that there was much repetitiion in here and found my attention wandering often. However the central question was interesting and was worth persisting with for me, but you’d have to be really interested in the subject to persevere.

Overall – slightly too dry and overly repetitive. ( )

In the world of animals, there exists an interesting phenomena: of the millions of species on the planet, why are there so many with extremely limited population sizes? What processes lead to the limiting of animal groups? Why, for instance, is the Kirtland’s warbler so rare that an entire festival is planned around their sighting? Eric Dinerstein, a veteran of the World Wildlife Fund, travels the world to check out hotspots of animal rarity. In The Kingdom of Rarities, he posits that the animal kingdom can be divided into two groups—the Kingdom of the Common and the Kingdom of the Rare. It’s these rare species that help to drive biological research and that research is one of the many keys required to unlock the mysteries of how the world’s ecosystems function.

Dinerstein’s investigations are limited to pockets of rare vertebrates in single habitats around the world. The zoological vignettes include:

• An expedition to the Foja Mountains to discuss rarity in isolated mountain ranges. Here, bowerbirds, birds of paradise, echidnas, and tree kangaroos are studied to see how one of the last unstudied areas on Earth thrives.
• A husband and wife team studying jaguars, pumas, and saki monkeys in the Madre de Dios region of Amazonian Peru to further analysis of how large mammals help to keep the ecosystem in balance.
• A festival in Grayling, Michigan to study the Kirtland’s warbler, whose extreme habitat persnickety-ness limits population size. They only perch on middle-aged jack pines that grow on sandy, nutrient-poor soil that are also affected by periodic fires.
• A look at the greater one-horned rhinoceros in Nepal and how human encroachment and poaching have made a mildly rare animal even rarer.
• A hunt for the giant anteaters and maned wolves in the Cerrado rainforest in Brazil being slowly marched towards rarity by agriculture companies. Dinerstein goes on an expedition with a fellow researcher and her tracking Labrador to find animal scat (for valuable scientific data).
• The introduction of invasive species onto the Hawaiian islands (humans, farm animals, and the malaria virus) and how that led to the shift in native populations (mainly bird species).
• A look at a half-century of chemical and incendiary weapons used human conflict and its affect on the kouprey, soala, and other large mammal populations of the forests of Vietnam and Cambodia.

This book is rich in biological facts, theories, and research. As a side benefit, you get a lot of inklings of current research being done by up-and-coming biologists and doctoral students. I thought maybe it would take me two days to finish this one, but after a chapter or two, I was thrilled to devour the entire thing. The writing starts off a little stilted, but smooths itself out once he goes exploring with fellow scientists. There are parts that feel like a cliched hippie lecture about curtailing agricultural invasions of native animal populations and reveling in the pure joy of seeing a rare species, but one the whole, the book educates as well as it excites. This one reminded me a lot of Elizabeth Royte’s The Tapir’s Morning Bath in that it looks at the both the animals being researched and the scientists doing the research. A thoroughly insightful and engaging book. ( )