OFNC Book Club Reads: Bitch by Lucy Cooke

What do albatrosses, whiptail lizards, and meerkats have in common? The females of these species are all used by writer and zoologist Lucy Cooke to demonstrate that, when it comes to the sexes, even the field of evolutionary biology has a few biases that need debunking.

In the OFNC Book Club Pick for December and January — Bitch: On the Female of the Species (Basic Books, 2022) — author Cooke explores neglected stories from the animal kingdom about female behaviours that are bold and diverse and anything but ‘nurturing’. Case in point: the chapter called “Fifty Ways to Eat Your Lover.”

Read a review of the book and interview with Cooke in The Guardian: “The zoologist sticking her neck out in the battle of the sexes.”

Or listen to Cooke shoot down the notion that females are “submissive”, “chaste”, and “monogamous” on NPR: “Forget Everything You Thought You Knew About Female Animals.”

Bitch will be the focus of the book club’s next meeting on Tuesday, January 14, 2025 at 7 p.m. on Zoom. All OFNC members are welcome, whether you’ve finished the book or not (though please note that you must have an OFNC membership to join).

If you’d like to attend the meeting, please first register by following this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEtdO2srT4qG9eW7dVyKjfYWnxWE4-y7nTN#/registration

Update: We are excited to welcome Dr. Lauryn Benedict of The Female Bird Song Project to Speak at the Meeting!

Lauryn Benedict is fascinated by the social lives of birds. She has spent 20+ years researching birds to figure out how they use sounds to signal meaning and coordinate behaviors. Her recent work examines song and other vocalizations in both males and females. Lauryn holds a B.A. from Cornell University and a Ph.D. from the University of California Berkeley. She is a Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Northern Colorado, and a collaborator on the Female Bird Song Project.

For more information on Dr. Benedict see https://www.unco.edu/nhs/biology/about-us/labs/benedict-lauryn/

The Female Bird Song Project is an international initiative started by researchers at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Leiden University, in The Netherlands. The project is a collaboration with citizen scientists around the world, with the goal to document female bird song and raise awareness that bird song, long thought to be an exclusively male trait, is actually widespread amongst both sexes.

Digging Deep into Fungi at First Meeting

The OFNC Book Club had our inaugural meeting at the end of October, where we explored the strange and fascinating (under)world of fungi. Our minds were on mycelium courtesy of Merlin Sheldrake’s bestseller from 2020, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures.

The book was a hit with the club, with conversations and debates ranging from how fungal networks challenge our notions of the individual, to Wood Wide Webs, and microdosing. We were also fortunate to have a guest speaker from Mycology Ottawa, Lynn Ovenden, who shared her passion for all things fungal and gave a local perspective on observing mushrooms in the wild.

Sheldrake’s book illuminates all the ways that human life and fungal life have intertwined. Mushrooms aren’t mere ingredients on our plates; different species of fungi are being used to clean up radioactive waste and even make furniture. Yet, as Sheldrake writes in his introduction, fungi “live their lives largely hidden from view, and over ninety percent of their species remain undocumented” (p. 3).

Want to Know More about the Book Club?

To get on the book club’s mailing list please email ofncbookclub@gmail.com with your name and email address. You’ll receive book club news and access to polls for future books.