Stories of a Naturalist

There was a time when naturalists would set off into the unknown with a backpack, a field notebook and the certainty that the world still awaited nameless secrets. They would leave for months, sometimes years, and return with boxes full of iridescent beetles, skins of animals never before described, seeds that would germinate in botanical gardens in rainy cities. They were scientists, yes, but they were also a peculiar species of poets: the only ones capable of turning an insect into an epic.This book does not pretend to be anything other than the chronicle of one of those journeys, although it took place in a time when almost everything seems to have been mapped, photographed and digitized. Its protagonist is a young naturalist who crosses the Atlantic Ocean with the same enthusiasm with which other centuries ago did it.But this book, although rigorous in its scientific truth, is not a treatise on zoology. It is a level-headed account that will bring you closer to the wild fauna of the Kalahari Desert.