BookBrowse Reviews The Call of the Honeyguide by Rob Dunn

BookBrowse:

A fascinating look at the mutual bonds of interdependence linking living things in nature, reminding us that we neglect our relationships with other species at our own peril.

This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For access to our digital magazine, free books,and other benefits, become a member today.

Partly because of our tech-mediated lives, partly because of increased urbanization, people around the world are less connected to nature than ever before. The average adult in the US spends about 90 percent of their time indoors. In the UK, a study showed that children are better at identifying Pokémon characters than common wildlife species. Meanwhile, humans have chopped down, burned, or otherwise destroyed nearly half of the Earth's forests. Some one million plant and animal species are at risk of extinction because of our encroachment on their habitats and destruction of the environment.

"We live and act as though we were all alone and could chart a future independent from the rest of the world," as Rob Dunn writes in The Call of the Honeyguide. The book is an antidote to that delusional shortsightedness. Focusing on the complex relationships of interdependence and mutual benefit that connect different species in an ecosystem, Dunn reminds us that we are interlinked with the rest of nature, that we need other species and they need us—a simple message that nonetheless "has become almost radical," he says, "in the context of modernity's disconnections from the living world."

Mutually beneficial interactions among species are known as mutualisms, and nature abounds with them. Fungi help plants access nutrients and water in the soil, while plants, in turn, nourish the fungi with sugars they produce through photosynthesis. Flowers provide nectar to bees as a source of food, and bees return the favor by transfering pollen from one flower to another, facilitating fertilization. Aphids secrete a sugary substance that ants eat; in exchange, the ants protect the aphids from predators and parasites. Humans host hundreds of species of microbes in our guts, and they reciprocate by helping us digest our food and regulate our immune systems.

In The Call of the Honeyguide, Dunn shows just how important mutualisms are in ecology, evolution, and—specifically—the history and development of the human species. Discussing examples ranging from grains and fruit trees to dogs, horses, and yeasts, the book explains how mutualisms have shaped our cultures, diets, behaviors, and even our biology in far-reaching ways. The ancient mutualism between humans and yeasts, for example, not only transformed societies—as seen in the cultural significance of bread, beer, wine, and other fermented beverages and foods—but also altered the genomes of our early ancestors, who evolved a gene mutation enabling them to better metabolize alcohol, the byproduct of yeast fermentation.

A professor of applied ecology at North Carolina State University and the author of seven previous popular science books, Dunn writes engagingly and with panache, lacing the text with allusions to art and literature, philosophical musings, and quirky digressions on topics as varied as belly button microbes, dog odors, and beer-making. We're treated to fascinating vignettes about a diversity of wildlife, including ants that protect their host trees by spraying venom on the seedlings of competitor trees, mites that crawl onto the heads of ants and beg for food, and figs that incubate the eggs of pollinating wasps in special chambers evolved expressly for that purpose.

The book also weaves in examples of remarkable human-wildlife partnerships from across different cultural traditions, including the story of the honeyguide—the emblematic bird of the book's title. At one time, these small brown birds called out to human honey hunters across sub-Saharan Africa, guiding them to hidden beehives in exchange for a share of the spoils. Today, this extraordinary human-bird mutualism has disappeared from all but a few places. "The birds no longer call because the humans no longer listen," Dunn writes.

While much of the book focuses on ancient mutualisms in our deep past, Dunn's ultimate concern is for the future. "I revisit our past and present as a way of illuminating possible futures, lifting up the hidden roles that mutualisms have played and can play in our human stories," he writes. The hope is that these stories will help us imagine new ways to partner with nature to meet the challenges of an imminently hotter, harsher future.

To that end, Dunn floats some intriguing possibilities, including houses built from fungi, microbe-based meats, and new yeasts that we could feed to cows to help them digest more of their food and so produce less methane. Ultimately, however, the book stops short of giving any definitive answers or concrete solutions for how to work with nature for a more sustainable future. The problem is too big and human beings too diverse, Dunn argues, for there to be any straightforward or singular answers.

That can feel wishy-washy, but The Call of the Honeyguide is not meant to be a policy guide. Instead, the book is a call to "tend to our mutualisms," a reminder to reconnect with the natural world and to take better heed of our relationships with other living things—for our mutual good.

"In a time in which so many people have stopped paying attention to the living world, conserving wild species that they might someday help us to make sense of the world is an act of hope," Dunn writes. "The great hope as we move forward is that we can imagine and create a world in which even more of the species that benefit us thrive, that we benefit ourselves by benefiting them."

This review first ran in the September 24, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.