Read Together: The Invasive Species Edition

This week’s Nonfiction November prompt is to pair a non-fiction book and a fiction book. I love doing this! I have two previous pairings under the Read Together heading- check them out.

For this week’s prompt, I am pairing two short ebooks that look at the eradication of animals. The non-fiction book Battle at the End of Eden is about the eradication of invasive species that are threatening native birds on some islands, and is ultimately a hopeful book despite being about so much death. I remember hearing about the efforts in New Zealand to eradicate rats from some of the smaller islands, to give the endangered native birds a sanctuary. They have been successful in some cases, but maintaining the sanctuary requires constant vigilence, because rats hitch rides on boats, and they are really good swimmers, as this story about an experiment run on Motuhoropapa Island shows.

The fiction book Pretty Bird is set in a dystopic future in which all animals have been killed by a plague of some sort- which makes it very strange when a bird appears on the protagonist’s doorstep. It is a creepy but strangely compelling story, full of twists and turns.

Both stories will make you think about the role of animals in an ecosystem. It is very hard to tell you more about why I’m pairing these two books without ruining Pretty Bird for you, but I think that if you read them together, you’ll see why I pair them, and will find yourself thinking about the fragile balance of an ecosystem, and how we don’t necessarily see how it is being destroyed until it is too late.