Shimmer: Flying Fox Exuberance in Worlds of Peril

by Deborah Bird Rose

I was called to flying-foxes. My research questions led me into multispecies ethnographic work involving wildlife carers and academically trained scientists in eastern Australia. The people I met were at the front line in the work of holding flying-foxes back from the edge of extinction. I continued to visit the north, and I revisited my notebooks from several decades of research with Aboriginal people. The research was exhilarating, and then again at times deeply disheartening. I was to encounter more passion, intimacy, cruelty, horror, complexity, generosity and wild beauty than I could ever have imagined. Living with flying-foxes, I came to understand, takes us straight to the heart of every big question facing Earth life in the 21st century.' In this deeply personal book, the last one she wrote before hear death in 2018, Deborah Bird Rose explores the shimmer of life - the iridescent pulse of beauty and power, the processes of transition and transformation - that flows across and between generations. Grounded within this insight, she develops and advocates for an ethics of attention that is in the world within everyday practices, and in this case for and with flying foxes and their worlds.

Genres: Nonfiction, Nature

312 pages, Hardcover

Published February 8, 2022

Reviews

[Clouvisse · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love bats

[Tessa Campisi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Life changing

[Molsa Roja(s) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Last of Deborah Bird's book, it feels simultaneously like a testament in which she asks for us to keep trying, keep fighting, keep re-membering those who do not have a (human) voice; feels, too, like a love letter to flying foxes, to Life, to those who commit their efforts to care and love and fight the deathwork and oblivion that comes with it; it feels, finally, as if her last breath had been a massive, yet tender, Yes!. This book is built, of course, around the living and dying of flying foxes, about how death is done and life sustained precariously, and so is both an ethnography of these batfolk we call the flying foxes but also, tangentially perhaps, on the Yarralin; it is, too, a book that belongs to the recently found extinction studies tradition; it is, as well, an ethics book. I'd like to say, then, that this is a loving and lovable book, one that tries, gently, to open our eyes and enlarge our souls; tremendously sensitive work, a touching, lively jewel that spreads its wings and finds itself comfortable on one's shoulder, speaking in whispers.