Before her latest book, Erika Howsare had often considered deer and how humans interact with them. “I had a hunch that learning about deer would be a great way to ask questions about how humans relate to the natural world in general,” she says, “and that turned out to be even more true than I expected.” The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship With Our Wild Neighbors explores the many ways deer are present in our lives and our mythologies as well as in the natural world.
“The research process had me reading histories of conservation and scientific papers about deer ecology, traveling to Texas and England and many other places, interviewing scientists and hunters and fawn rehabbers and a guy who picks up roadkill in Michigan, and trolling through art history and literature looking for mentions of deer,” Howsare says. “It was a delight!” One of her favorite discoveries was that the word wilderness gained its middle syllable from the Old English word deor, meaning “beast or animal,” tying the word to animals and, specifically, to deer.
The book will appeal to those “who like reading about history and science, people who like digging into what’s beneath the cultural ideas we all take for granted, and people who enjoy a new perspective on things that are very familiar and ordinary,” she says. “I’ve heard from both hunters and animal lovers who have liked it, and there are a few parts that I hope are just plain good stories.”
The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with our Wild Neighbors, January 2024, nonfiction, paperback $17.95, hardcover $28, by Erika Howsare, and published by Catapult, New York, NY. Find the book at local bookstores or through Bookshop.org. Learn more at ErikaHowsare.com.
