This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

We have one cardinal rule on 99% invisible.

No cardinals, meaning we don't deal with the natural world, only the built world.

So when I read John Mwellum's brilliant book called Wild Ones, a sometimes-dism's weirdly reassuring story about looking at people looking at animals in America.

I didn't think I'd ever do an episode of 99% invisible about it.

I just read it for fun.

But then I saw John perform stories from the book live with musical accompaniment and I thought,

I need to put this on the radio. I still call this radio. Anyway, what you need to know about Wild Ones is that it isn't a book about nature.

It's a book about how we fit nature into our modern lives.

Wild Ones is about the cutsy stuffed animals, the eco-tours, and the Byzantine methods of conservation

that evolve when our experience with wildlife goes from something natural to something designed.

Human animal interaction has become a designed experience,

and the story of that transition, as the title of the book suggests,

is sometimes dismayed and also weirdly reassuring.

John Muilum is friends with the band Black Prairie and as he was writing the book, they concocted this idea of the band creating a soundtrack to the book,

and the result was an extended EP called Wild Ones.

A musical score for the things you might see in your head when you reflect on certain characters and

incidents that you read in the book. The writer and the band then went on a short tour

with the song and story extravaganza that I'm going to play for you today.

When I saw them perform this live in San Francisco, I freaked out it was so good and I costed them in the dressing room and said, you have to let me share this with my audience.

So here it is, and here we go. Oh, And then. Oh, Oh, Oh, It happens every summer.

every summer. Small turtles called Diamond-backed Terins, skitter out of the water around JFK Airport, New York.

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