Book dossier

A Natural History of Parenting

by Susan Allport

In A Natural History of Parenting, Susan Allport, a naturalist and science writer, explores the exciting and often startling dynamics of maternal and paternal behavior among the species. When one of the ewes Allport was raising refused to mother her new lamb, she was forced to reconsider many of her preconceptions about the world of parenting. She began to explore the roots of parental instincts across the broad spectrum of the animal kingdoms. In A Natural History of Parenting, she examines the awesome diversity of nature to reveal what we share with insects, birds, and other animals, and, just as important, how we differ from them. Allport's study takes the reader from caves in Texas filled with twenty million bats to huge tanks of beluga whales at the New York Aquarium, from the icy reaches of East Greenland where Arctic wolves raise their young to ant nests where huge labor pools have led to primitive infant care. Along the way, she gathers research on myriad creatures - beavers and wasps, birds and elephants, frogs and humans - to show us a magnificent variety of parental behavior among species, from a male emperor penguin forgoing nourishment to spend weeks protecting an egg balanced on the top of his feet to the manifestations of the human female's "nesting instinct."