Remove the dust jacket from Mary Roach's newest book and look at the spine. You'll see that it reads "ROACH FUZZ," which, accident or not, suggests the sense of humor that has made her books bestsellers.
In their quest for easy food, bears wander into homes and supermarkets, and this problem sends her to the Canadian Rockies. Elephants kill a lot more people than bears or lions do, so Roach goes to India to see attempts at a solution. At the Vatican she explores what's being done, in a very Christian way, to battle bothersome gulls and rats.
Animal behavior interests Roach, but she is even more interested in how scientists and others are trying to solve these problems without going to the extreme of killing troublesome animals. Scientists, for example, are looking for a way to get mice to produce only male babies. And what might the unintended consequences be if these experiments prove successful? She asks about that, too.
Scarecrows don't really work, or at least not for long. Smart birds soon realize that a scarecrow means food, so it actually attracts them. What will scare them away? Noise? Motion? Dead birds? Scientists are looking into all these things.
Roach is as much a humorist as she is a science writer, and her books never fail to be as fun as they are informative. Readers, in fact, may be more likely to take away odd bits of amusing trivia from Fuzz than anything else. (Much of this is to found in footnotes, so don't ignore them.) For example:
There is such a thing as a chicken gun, but it's not for shooting chickens. Rather it's for shooting supermarket chickens at plane engines to test the effects of bird strikes.
As dangerous as elephants can be when they're sober, they are even more dangerous when drunk. And they like to get drunk.
The Vatican is the only nation in the world where no one has ever been born.
When you were a kid you probably came across books with titles like Science Can Be Fun. Mary Roach proves again and again that that is true.
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