The Song of the Dodo
Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions
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The Song of the Dodo
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Narrated by:
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Jacques Roy
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By:
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David Quammen
About this listen
David Quammen's book, The Song of the Dodo, is a brilliant, stirring work, breathtaking in its scope, far-reaching in its message - a crucial book in precarious times, which radically alters the way in which we understand the natural world and our place in that world. It's also a book full of entertainment and wonders.
In The Song of the Dodo, we follow Quammen's keen intellect through the ideas, theories, and experiments of prominent naturalists of the last two centuries. We trail after him as he travels the world, tracking the subject of island biogeography, which encompasses nothing less than the study of the origin and extinction of all species.
Why is this island idea so important? Because islands are where species most commonly go extinct - and because, as Quammen points out, we live in an age when all of Earth's landscapes are being chopped into island-like fragments by human activity.
Through his eyes, we glimpse the nature of evolution and extinction, and in so doing come to understand the monumental diversity of our planet, and the importance of preserving its wild landscapes, animals, and plants. We also meet some fascinating human characters. By the book's end we are wiser, and more deeply concerned, but Quammen leaves us with a message of excitement and hope.
©2019 David Quammen (P)2019 Simon & Schuster UKListeners also enjoyed...
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- By: Matthew D. LaPlante
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 9 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 92
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 78
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 78
The world's largest land mammal could help us end cancer. The fastest bird is showing us how to solve a century-old engineering mystery. The oldest tree is giving us insights into climate change. The loudest whale is offering clues about the impact of solar storms. For a long time, scientists ignored superlative life forms as outliers. Increasingly, though, researchers are coming to see great value in studying plants and animals that exist on the outermost edges of the bell curve.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Fascinating survey of amazing biology
- By Nerd's-eye view on 12-06-19
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A Most Remarkable Creature
- The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World's Smartest Birds of Prey
- By: Jonathan Meiburg
- Narrated by: Jonathan Meiburg
- Length: 9 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 662
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 567
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 564
An enthralling account of a modern voyage of discovery as we meet the clever, social birds of prey called caracaras, which puzzled Darwin, fascinate modern-day falconers, and carry secrets of our planet's deep past in their family history.
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5 out of 5 stars
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I don't leave reviews often, but . . .
- By Steven L Peck on 06-24-21
By: Jonathan Meiburg
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Remarkable Creatures
- Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species
- By: Sean B. Carroll
- Narrated by: Jim Bond
- Length: 9 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 139
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 75
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 73
Just 150 years ago, most of our world was an unexplored wilderness. Our sense of its age was vastly off the mark. And what we believed to be the history of our own species consisted of fantastic myths and fairy tales; fossils, known for millennia, were seen as the bones of dragons and other imagined creatures. How did we learn so much so quickly? Remarkable Creatures celebrates the pioneers who replaced our fancies with the even more remarkable real story of how our world evolved.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A Remarkable Journey
- By Michael Dowd on 03-22-09
By: Sean B. Carroll
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Letters to a Young Scientist
- By: Edward O. Wilxon
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 4 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 316
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 270
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 272
Edward O. Wilson has distilled sixty years of teaching into a book for students, young and old. Reflecting on his coming-of-age in the South as a Boy Scout and a lover of ants and butterflies, Wilson threads these twenty-one letters, each richly illustrated, with autobiographical anecdotes that illuminate his career - both his successes and his failures - and his motivations for becoming a biologist.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Long on biography, short on advice
- By A. Mandelin on 08-02-18
By: Edward O. Wilxon
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Monster of God
- By: David Quammen
- Narrated by: Brian Holsopple
- Length: 16 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 112
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 98
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 99
For millennia, lions, tigers, and their man-eating kin have kept our dark, scary forests dark and scary, and their predatory majesty has been the stuff of folklore. But by the year 2150 big predators may only exist on the other side of glass barriers and chain-link fences. Their gradual disappearance is changing the very nature of our existence. We no longer occupy an intermediate position on the food chain; instead we survey it invulnerably from above - so far above that we are in danger of forgetting that we even belong to an ecosystem.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great book, shame about the performance
- By Shirzy on 05-23-18
By: David Quammen
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The Sediments of Time
- My Lifelong Search for the Past
- By: Meave Leakey, Samira Leakey
- Narrated by: Susan Lyons
- Length: 14 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 52
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 43
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 43
Preeminent paleoanthropologist Meave Leakey brings us along on her remarkable journey to reveal the diversity of our early pre-human ancestors and how past climate change drove their evolution. She offers a fresh account of our past, as recent breakthroughs have allowed new analysis of her team’s fossil findings and vastly expanded our understanding of our ancestors. Meave’s own personal story is replete with drama, from thrilling discoveries on the shores of Lake Turkana to run-ins with armed herders and every manner of wildlife, to raising her children....
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5 out of 5 stars
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Brilliant!
- By tess koffler on 04-07-21
By: Meave Leakey, and others
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The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs
- A New History of a Lost World
- By: Steve Brusatte
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 4,453
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 4,002
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 3,982
In this stunning narrative spanning more than 200 million years, Steve Brusatte, a young American paleontologist who has emerged as one of the foremost stars of the field - discovering 10 new species and leading groundbreaking scientific studies and fieldwork - masterfully tells the complete, surprising, and new history of the dinosaurs, drawing on cutting-edge science to dramatically bring to life their lost world and illuminate their enigmatic origins, spectacular flourishing, astonishing diversity, cataclysmic extinction, and startling living legacy.
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2 out of 5 stars
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"The Rise of the Scientists Who Study Dinosaurs"
- By Daniel Powell on 09-16-18
By: Steve Brusatte
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Why Evolution Is True
- By: Jerry A. Coyne
- Narrated by: Victor Bevine
- Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,924
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,440
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,436
Why evolution is more than just a theory: it is a fact. In all the current highly publicized debates about creationism and its descendant "intelligent design", there is an element of the controversy that is rarely mentioned: the evidence, the empirical truth of evolution by natural selection.
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5 out of 5 stars
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As great as everyone says it is
- By Joseph on 12-01-10
By: Jerry A. Coyne
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The Ancestor's Tale
- A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
- By: Richard Dawkins
- Narrated by: Richard Dawkins, Lalla Ward
- Length: 8 hrs and 55 mins
- Abridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 573
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 499
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 491
In The Ancestor's Tale, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins offers a masterwork: an exhilarating reverse tour through evolution, from present-day humans back to the microbial beginnings of life four billion years ago. Throughout the journey, Dawkins spins entertaining, insightful stories and sheds light on topics such as speciation, sexual selection, and extinction. The Ancestor's Tale is at once an essential education in evolutionary theory and riveting in its telling.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Please do an unabridged version!
- By MovieExpertise on 09-29-16
By: Richard Dawkins
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First Peoples in a New World
- Colonizing Ice Age America
- By: David J. Meltzer
- Narrated by: Christopher Prince
- Length: 11 hrs
- Abridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 179
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 152
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 151
More than 12,000 years ago, in one of the greatest triumphs of prehistory, humans colonized North America, a continent that was then truly a new world. Just when and how they did so has been one of the most perplexing and controversial questions in archaeology.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Last Gasp of American Anthropological Orthodoxy
- By Thomas66 on 01-05-17
By: David J. Meltzer
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Paleontology
- A Brief History of Life
- By: Ian Tattersall
- Narrated by: Brett Barry
- Length: 6 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 112
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 71
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Story4 out of 5 stars 72
Ian Tattersall, a highly esteemed figure in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, and paleontology, leads a fascinating tour of the history of life and the evolution of human beings. Starting at the very beginning, Tattersall examines patterns of change in the biosphere over time, and the correlations of biological events with physical changes in the Earth's environment.
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5 out of 5 stars
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great summary of where we are with understanding
- By david on 06-25-11
By: Ian Tattersall
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Sea People
- The Puzzle of Polynesia
- By: Christina Thompson
- Narrated by: Susan Lyons
- Length: 11 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,022
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 884
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 881
A thrilling, intellectual detective story that looks deep into the past to uncover who first settled the islands of the remote Pacific, where they came from, how they got there, and how we know.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Long Lost History
- By Than on 04-19-19
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The Thing with Feathers
- The Surprising Lives of Birds and What They Reveal About Being Human
- By: Noah Strycker
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 8 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 103
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 89
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 88
Birds are highly intelligent animals, yet their intelligence is dramatically different from our own and has been little understood. As we learn more about the secrets of bird life, we are unlocking fascinating insights into memory, relationships, game theory, and the nature of intelligence itself. The Thing with Feathers explores the astonishing homing abilities of pigeons, the good deeds of fairy-wrens, the influential flocking abilities of starlings, the deft artistry of bowerbirds, the extraordinary memories of nutcrackers, and other mysteries.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Interesting book, terrible reader
- By MGM123 on 03-16-18
By: Noah Strycker
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The Wonder of Birds
- What They Tell Us About Ourselves, the World, and a Better Future
- By: Jim Robbins
- Narrated by: Danny Campbell
- Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 85
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 81
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 79
Birds, Jim Robbins posits, are our most vital connection to nature. They compel us to look to the skies, both literally and metaphorically, draw us out into nature to seek their beauty, and let us experience vicariously what it is like to be weightless. Birds have helped us in so many of our human endeavors: learning to fly, providing clothing and food, and helping us better understand the human brain and body.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Stories about birds with something for everyone
- By D on 07-24-17
By: Jim Robbins
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Ancient Bones
- Unearthing the Astonishing New Story of How We Became Human
- By: Madelaine Böhme
- Narrated by: Aimée Ayotte
- Length: 7 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 53
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 48
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 48
Africa has long been considered the cradle of life - where life and humans evolved - but somewhere west of Munich, Germany, paleoclimatologist and paleontologist Madelaine Böhme and her team make a discovery that is beyond anything they ever imagined: the 12-million-year-old bones of an ancient ape - Danuvius guggenmos - which makes headlines around the world and defies prevailing theories of human history and where human life began.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Brave Attempt
- By Bill Treat on 10-15-22
By: Madelaine Böhme
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When Life Nearly Died
- The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time
- By: Michael J. Benton
- Narrated by: Julian Elfer
- Length: 11 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 156
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 131
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 131
Today it is common knowledge that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteorite impact 65 million years ago that killed half of all species then living. It is far less widely understood that a much greater catastrophe took place at the end of the Permian period 251 million years ago: at least 90 percent of life on earth was destroyed. When Life Nearly Died documents not only what happened during this gigantic mass extinction, but also the recent renewal of the idea of catastrophism.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Obscurity to Enlightenment - A Mystery Revealed
- By Dipam on 03-18-21