Hello everybody this is how hearing backcountry hunters and anglers podcast and

Blas I wanted to introduce our guest today not waste any of his time I'm with

David Kwoman he is the the foremost science writer of our time and I feel like it's kind of an

honor to interview somebody whose work I've read now since the 1980s. David Quaman was born outside of Cincinnati, Ohio, and he grew up playing in the hardwood forest there and watched them completely destroyed in a wave of development and that experience sort of

set among the path which he's taken as a writer and explorer across the planet.

And it's a path from which anybody who's ever read

his work has benefited.

So just briefly, you may know his work

from outside magazine. He was a columnist there for 15 years.

He was a writer at National Geographic for years and years. He was one of the, the only author ever asked to write an entire issue of National Geographic.

That was a beautiful piece of work called Yellowstone, a journey through America's Wild

Heart and it was about the Greater Yellowstone

ecosystem and David drew on his decades of living in Bozeman, Montana, or being

based in Bozeman, Montana and exploring that ecosystem to write that piece.

His books include The Song of the Dodo,

which is kind of a study of extinction,

gave rise to the idea of island geography where wildlife habitats are fragmented in

such ways that they begin to resemble islands and then that is a precursor to

extinction. He wrote a book called Monster of God, which any backcountry

rambler would enjoy. And it is about the history of predation on human beings by big predators and how that plays out in our

lives, our mythology, and our very DNA.

Quaman has been a student of evolutionary biology now for decades.

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