Nancy Castaldo, "Squirrel: How a Backyard Forager Shapes Our World" (Island Press, 2025)
About this episode
Nancy Castaldo discusses her book on the ecological and cultural significance of squirrels.
Squirrels are a common sight, seemingly everywhere in wild and urban nature. Their chattering antics in city parks delight us while their raids on our backyard gardens and birdfeeders never fail to exasperate. But squirrels are more than amusing backyard entertainers, and few of us know much about them or fully appreciate their role in keeping the environment healthy. As stress on the natural world intensifies, should we be paying more attention to the plight of squirrels?In Squirrel: How a Backyard Forager Shapes Our World (Island Press, 2025), Nancy Castaldo shines new light on this familiar backyard mammal, exploring their staggering diversity (they’re found on all continents but Antarctica) and the many surprising ways they shape our world, our communities, and our cultures. Each chapter explores an aspect of squirrels and their close and sometimes fraught association with humans: their importance to myriad ecosystems through sophisticated food-caching strategies; their introduction to nineteenth-century urban parks as adorable ambassadors for nature; their complicated global status as both invasive and endangered; their role as celebrated cultural icons and social media…
More episodes of New Books in Animal Studies
- Christos Lynteris, "How Plague Got Rats: Mastering a Zoonotic Pandemic" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2026)
- Kenneth G. Zysk, "South Asian Animal Divination: A Critical Anthology" (Brill, 2025)
- The Vet at the End of the Earth: Adventures with Animals in the South Atlantic
- Anne Mendelson, "Spoiled: The Myth of Milk as Superfood" (Columbia UP, 2023)
- Josh Milburn, "Food, Justice, and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully" (Oxford UP, 2023)
- Thomas Zeitzoff, "No Option But Sabotage: The Radical Environmental Movement and the Climate Crisis" (Oxford UP, 2026)
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the New Books in Animal Studies podcast page.