The Call of the Honeyguide: What Science Tells Us about How to Live Well with the Rest of Life

by Rob Dunn

How rethinking our relationships with other species can help us reimagine the future of humankind 
 
In the woodlands of sub-Saharan Africa, sometime deep in our species’ past, something strange a bird called out, not to warn others of human presence, but to call attention to herself. Having found a beehive, that bird—a honeyguide—sought human aid to break in. The behavior can seem almost How would a bird come to think that people could help her? Isn’t life simply bloodier than that? 

As Rob Dunn argues in The Call of the Honeyguide, it isn’t. Nature is red in tooth and claw, but in equal measure, life works together. Cells host even smaller life, wrapped in a web of mutual interdependence. Ants might go to war, but they also tend fungi, aphids, and even trees. And we humans work not just with honeyguides but with yeast, crops, and pets. Ecologists call these beneficial relationships mutualisms. And they might be the most important forces in the evolution of life.  

We humans often act as though we are all alone, independent from the rest of life. As The Call of the Honeyguide shows, we are not. It is a call to action for a more beneficent, less lonely future. 

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Nature, Animals, Environment, Biology

Audible Audio

First published August 26, 2025

About the author

Robert Dunn is a biologist, writer and professor in the Department of Applied Ecology at North Carolina State University.

He has written several books and his science essays have appeared at magazines such as BBC Wildlife Magazine, Scientific American, Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic and others. He has become known for efforts to involve the public as citizen scientists.

Dunn's writings have considered the quest to find new superheavy elements, why men are bald, how modern chickens evolved, whether a virus can make a person fat, the beauty of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the biology of insect eggs, the secret lives of cats, the theory of ecological medicine, why the way we think about calories is wrong, and why monkeys (and once upon a time, human women) tend to give birth at night.

Ph.D., Ecology and Evolution, University of Connecticut (2003). He was a Fulbright fellow in Australia. He is currently the William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor at NC State University.

{more at Wikipedia}

Reviews

[Clif Hostetler · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book explores many examples of mutualisms found among various living species and how humans have throughout history taken advantage of, or in some cases hindered, these mutualisms in the production of food and energy. The book then concludes by suggesting that optimizing existing mutualisms as well as development of new ones will enable survival and enhanced quality of life for all living species in the future.

The spectrum of living forms discussed varies from the microscopic to large mammals, and along the way discusses interesting aspects of everyday life including odor, our pets, and favorite foods. Thus there are chapters discussing body odor, dogs, cats, cattle, body odor, yeast, fertilizer, waste products, petroleum, termites, and ants. (That’s not a complete list.)

The book’s title refers to an African bird, honeyguide, which has been known to lead people to locations of honey beehives—an example of interspecies cooperation. Another example described are the Thaus people in Australia who have a history of cooperating with killer whales that help them to capture baleen whales.

The following are some excerpts from the book with my introductory comments.

The following points out that earth’s human population consumes large quantities of food, but the variety of sources is small:

Today, essentially all the meat that humans eat globally comes from cows, pigs, and chickens. Those cows, pigs, and chickens depend, in turn, on five plant species for most of their food. The elements in the average human cell come from these and five other plant species, whether directly or indirectly, when we consume the bodies of cows, pigs and chickens. On the one hand, humans now depend, collectively, on more species than we ever have before. On the other hand, these ten plus three species matter disproportionately. Together today we are 8 billion humans made, like homemade dolls, out of a bit of wheat, some soy, corn, rice, and the animals these crops feed. (p.68)

From a Darwinian evolutionary perspective chickens have been extraordinarily successful by now outnumbering the population of all other birds combined:

At any given time, tens of billions of chickens are alive on Earth. … That makes the chicken population greater than the populations of all other birds on Earth—be they sparrow, turkey, or osprey—combined. … from a Darwinian perspective, it is hard to imagine a greater success for chickens. The mathematics is similar for pigs or cows. Evolutionarily among the most successful thing any species could do over the past 20,000 years is to partner with humans.(p.109)

Chickens have the numbers, but are they happy being a major food source?

What do you want to measure about your own relationship with the beings on which you depend? And how fully are you willing to align your theoretical perspective and your actual consumption? How should we collectively answer all of these questions while still providing the world’s population with the protein equivalent of 68.5 billion chickens, 1.5 billion pigs and 0.3 billion cows? Or, perhaps, even more than that, given the expected growth of the global human population by an additional 2 billion people in the next three decades. (p.118)

The following excerpt reminds us of the predatory instincts of our pet cats and suggests that maybe that’s what we like about them. (I suspect that the author doesn't like cats.)

It is extraordinary how much domestic cats look, move and act like smaller versions of tigers, lions, leopards, or jaguars. … Cats, now, eat billions, literally billions, of wild birds each year. Collectively, they eat more than 2,000 different wild species, of which hundreds are of conservation concern. They are a detriment to the ecosystems that sustain us, and yet we look away from this indiscretion (and, on top of this, we must feed our pet cats, which requires the production of chickens or aquaculture fish, or the harvest of wild fish at an enormous scale). (p.129)

When we use petroleum and artificial fertilizers we are harvesting our ecological past.

We benefit not only from living trees but also from trees that are hundreds of millions of years old, trees being picked out of the Earth by enormous excavators. In doing so, we create an extraordinary temporal rift. Our lifestyles are facilitate by the natural productivity of the past.
Our ancestors lived in trees. Today, our cities are nested in and run on the energy of trees. We live in cities supported by the dead branches of ancestors carboniferous forests dependent, diffusely, on each of many kinds of extinct tree species, and so the failure of their decomposers, we are fruits hanging from Earth’s ancient and blackened grove. (p.174)

The following excerpt suggests that our pet dogs know more about us than we know about them:

The big picture is one in which dog-human communication is rich but imbalanced. Dogs can understand tens and, sometimes, even hundreds of words. Humans, meanwhile, can understand a handful of dog gestures and utterances and are readily tricked by the sad or smiling faces of their dogs.
… But there is something else here, because dogs also understand some of the mumblings of our subconscious. They might understand things we don’t even intend for the to hear. They can “listen to” our smells, and in doing so may know even more about what we are saying to each other than we do, or at least more than we consciously do. They may know more about us than we know about ourselves. (p.209)

The following claims that humans are continuously sniffing their surroundings:

… the average person has their fingers near their nose more than 20 percent of the time, one-fifth of you will have a finger in or near your nose while reading this. … When people sniff their fingers, they are able to detect unique aromas from other people on their hands. But most often, their consciousness does not “know” they have taken this information in. … Every day, the olfactory-immune subconscious is taking over our very fingers and asking them to probe the world, and, having done so, to report back to the nose and the ancient parts of the brain to which it is connected. (p.217)

Maybe our pet dogs can teach us to understand the living world that surrounds us:

If part of what dogs offer us is a way to connect with the rest of the living world, this suggests a possible future. What if we could imagine even more ways to pay attention, to be reminded of the life around us? What if we could revitalize our awareness of the lives on which we depend but from which we have become so distanced? What if technology could help us toward this renewed and expanded connection through the expansion of our senses? More than that, what if we could even measure in real time the benefits species offer to us, on whatever terms we think to be most important? (p.239)

Humans need to find and enhance mutualisms in order to survive the challenges of climate change:

If humans are to persist in these regions, it will require new kinds of innovation. Our default approach to such conditions is to imagine purely technological innovation. But we need to ask what kinds of mutualisms we might engage in to survive in these places. They will need to be new, or newly construed. Elsewhere, the life ways that currently sustain humans will need to change. (p.250)

The following is the closest the author comes to answering the questions he’s been asking about the future of humans to successfully utilize mutualisms:

To the extent to which I have a simple answer, it is that we need to work together to come up with a range of possible future scenarios for our mutualisms, that we might be able to actively choose among those scenarios. Coming up with these scenarios requires not just scientists, historians, anthropologists, and other scholars, but also artists and other creatives. (p.253)

Lacking specific answers the author resorts to metaphor:

… these species offer value, a kind of narrative medicine, as analogues to our own societies. Insects, and particularly social insects, help us to tell stories, however imperfect our perspectives might be at any given moment. We are ants. We are like ants. We can see ourselves in the lives of ants. Metaphor. Simile. Allegory. Take your pick. (p.273)

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was thrilled to find this book to review on Netgalley, as mutualisms is a subject of interest to me. I like the idea of how different organisms have bonded and used each other in ways that are of mutual benefit to both parties. The first mutualism of note being prokaryotic cells that formed symbiotic relationships to become eukaryotic cells. There are others here, like the killer whales who helped humans with their fishing in exchange for their favorite bits of food, and the honeyguide bird that leads humans to honey so the humans can smoke out the bees and make it safe for the bird to eat what’s left behind. Of course, there are other examples that don’t involve humans, like the bacteria in a termite’s stomach that benefit from helping termites digest wood.

I was impressed with all the first-hand knowledge the author had of the subjects, but that was also a detriment because he often forgot to introduce them. For example, he started talking about honeyguides like I already knew that they were birds (I didn’t). Also, there were some subjects that I already knew about and felt that he glossed over some of the more interesting bits I would have included, with a tendency to meander into other subjects before fully exploring an idea. But overall, it was an enjoyable and informative read. I think it’s pie-in-th-sky optimistic to think that seeing mutualisms in nature could make humans become better, but I guess if you’re going to have a thesis, you might as well hope the best for humanity, even if we’re being quite self-centered at the moment. Then again, nature’s mutualisms pretty much started out being centered on what’s in it for me rather than what’s in it for the other partner.

Overall, despite my gripes, it’s a book worth reading. If the idea of it appeals to you at all, give it a try.

[Peter Tillman]

Nice review at the NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/bo...
Excerpt:
"Dunn’s quirky humor and love of the obscure energize his academic questioning. In fascinating asides, he offers examples of purely nonhuman mutualisms: ants that tend orchards; mites that ride on ants’ heads and beg for food like “toy poodles.”

I've had good luck with Dunn's previous books. In particular, I would draw your attention to his "Never Home Alone: (2019). My 4-star review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[June · Rating 4 out of 5]

There was much new information in this book, most of which was easy to picture, but some was too technical. The best parts were all the examples used to explain his points as well as the inclusion of quite a few people whom I really like, such as E.O. Wilson as well as both Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon from my home state. The author makes a strong case for improving our environmental approaches.

[Anna Clark · Rating 4 out of 5]

An important eco non-fiction covering ants, yeast, honey bees, trees, wolves vs dogs and other mutualities. Like “braiding sweet grass” this research highlights the importance of our presence in the natural world. Reading books like this makes me sad for our children and theirs as we are far too unaware of the damage that has come without this insight.

[Brett Keeler · Rating 5 out of 5]

I teach AP Environmental Science, and I think this book covers a lot of material for the beginning of that course in a unique way that I find so interesting - not only focusing on how species work together, but how humans are engaging in mutualisms with those species around the world.

The book doesn't chronologically follow a historical pattern of mutualisms, but you can piece together a history of human mutualisms with other species from the book. Chance interactions with wolves, changing climates pushing our ancestors into grasslands, and often misunderstood relationships with forests gave humans the necessary environments to leap into out commanding positions today. By framing these interactions as mutualisms - which they certainly are - it gives agency to us and to our ability to make these interactions better. I was particularly intrigued by the ending note of the book. If we don't leverage and rely on our biologic companions more, then we're just going to have to replace ecosystem services with machines - something I don't think our technology will be capable of anytime soon. It would also lead to a rather bleak world in my opinion.

This book is full of good science, good anecdotes, and is accessible to students or those not in the sciences. I'd recommend it to all and certainly to students interested in any biological field.

[Richard Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are many examples of mutually beneficial relationships between humans and other creatures. This is pretty obvious with farmed animals and crops that we have intentionally altered to serve our needs but which in their own ways have also altered us to serve them. Another big example of mutuality discussed in this book is yeast, which has taught us baking and fermentation in exchange for ensuring that it survives and thrives. The challenge posed by this book is to find other ways to create and nurture mutually beneficial relationships in our daily lives and social interactions, in our governmental structures, social programs and organizations. How can we build virtuous circles, feedback systems in which all of the affected parties help each other for beneficial results? Of course, there is also always a risk of mutuality devolving into a one-way path of parasitism that mostly or solely benefits one of the parties or of the feedback loop growing out of control so that we are getting too much of a good thing, but the general principle seems right that we should nurture relationships of mutuality that we already have. Don't let them fail through carelessness. And always seek opportunities for new ones.

[Hannah Buschert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rob Dunn's The Call of the Honeyguide is an incredibly informed look at mutualisms with the natural environment, many of the examples explored are related to humans and our part in the relationship. Dunn artfully weaves storytelling and science education in an easily digestible way that educates the reader on the natural world and our relationships with other living organisms. The author starts off discussing our mutually beneficial relationship with honeyguides, which flows into a variety of other topics from bacteria and fungi, to Killer Whales, wolves, and beavers.

The author is obviously very knowledgeable about the topic and does a great job of exploring the history and providing practical applications of mutualism that apply to everyday life or have lead us to a certain place in time. It was an enjoyable and interesting read. I imagine it may not appeal to those interested in deep-in-the-weeds science.

Thank you to NetGalley and Basic Books for providing this ARC for my unbiased review.

[Rayfes Mondal · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is much more interconnectedness among all types of life on Earth than most of us realize. Rob gives us a glimpse into some of the connections. We ignore these at our peril but this isn't a doomsday book. Includes fascinating looks at our domestication of plants and animals and how we have been domesticated in other cases.

[Laura Madsen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting look at mutualisms in nature and between nature and humans, including honeyguides (birds), yeast that ferment our food, livestock and agriculture species, trees which scrub CO2 for us, decomposers, bacteria in our sweat glands, and beavers (ecosystem engineers).

[Foggygirl · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great read

[Anne Gerber]

Dnf

[Vivian]

This is a DNF at 20%, which is disappointing. I love the topic of this book, but the writing was not very engaging. There was good information here, but it was a slog to get through.

[Ashish · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

some good ideas, needed to be much shorter and less meandering.