When Nature Calls: The Unusual Bathroom Habits of the World’s Creatures

And it is 22 of these “strangest of ways” that Birmingham shares in When Nature Calls: The Unusual Bathroom Habits of the World’s Creatures. Birmingham’s poopers include insects, birds, reptiles, fish and land and sea mammals. Each of the almost two dozen poopers is treated on a single page, with the page containing two text portions provided by Birmingham along with one of Whamond’s ink and digital watercolour illustrations. Birmingham’s main text addresses the “unusual bathroom habit”. For example,

A skipper caterpillar is a champ when it comes to launching its poo. It shoots out poop pellets – known as frass in the bug world – and sends them flying about 40 times the length of its body! Why does it fire the frass so far? To outsmart predators like wasps. These buzzing bugs are attracted to the smell of the caterpillar’s droppings. But even if they sniff out the poop, they won’t find a caterpillar nearby to snack on.

Whamond’s accompanying illustration speaks to the main text. In this case, a wasp, with a puzzled look on its face, is shown hovering over a pile of smelly poop pellets while a caterpillar peeks out from a tuft of grass. Also located within the illustration space is Birmingham’s shorter secondary text which adds supplementary information to the earlier poop facts. About the skipper caterpillar, readers will also learn:

The skipper caterpillar’s pellets can soar up to 1 metre (3 feet) away from its body – or about the length of a baseball bat.

Back matter includes a “Conclusion”, “Author’s Note”, “Index” and “Suggested Reading” (books and websites). The book’s title, plus Whamond’s cover illustration, will readily sell the book to its intended audience. And while Birmingham’s When Nature Calls offers a lot of fun (and often surprising) information, it is the author’s hope, as expressed in her “Conclusion”, that the book’s contents “help us appreciate the wonders of the animal kingdom”.