Without flies, there would be no chocolate. Birds, bees and butterflies get all the pollination press, but according to biologist and ethologist Jonathan Balcombe, flies are the unsung heroes of the pollen-transfer game. The cacao tree is “one of the most devilishly difficult plants to pollinate,” and teeny-tiny midges are the only creatures that can accomplish the task. Flies are important to lots of other foods, too, from mangoes to coriander to carrots.

These pollination revelations are just a few among many fascinating facts in the edifying and entertaining Super Fly: The Unexpected Lives of the World’s Most Successful Insects. Balcombe makes a convincing argument that yes, flies can be annoying—and their fondness for the “putrid flesh of a rotting carcass” is certainly disgusting—but they’re also misunderstood.

Balcombe hopes readers will consider “the range of critical beneficial services [flies] perform, including pollination, waste removal, natural pest control, and being a critical food source for scores of other animals.” From wound-healing maggots to flies that helped overturn wrongful convictions, there’s much to learn about the heroism of these tiny creatures.

The author, who’s written four previous popular science books (including the 2016 bestseller What a Fish Knows), has done impressively extensive research for Super Fly, interviewing experts and scrutinizing studies to make his case for a more charitable view of the order Diptera. His insatiable curiosity and his gift for making the esoteric understandable are on full display—in addition to his wry sense of humor. The occasion of his body being temporarily invaded by African skin maggots is handled with resigned aplomb; he also quips that “fly sex comes in 50 shades of brown.”

But Balcombe is quite serious about flies’ impact on humanity and the Earth, urging more attention to flies' massive evolutionary success. (One expert “estimates there are about 17 million flies for every human.”) He asks, “How closely, then, are flies’ fates enmeshed with our own?” For those who wish to learn the answer, Super Fly is an excellent and compelling start.

Have you ever thought, What my household needs is a few peacocks? Me neither. But that didn’t stop me from enjoying Sean Flynn’s Why Peacocks? An Unlikely Search for Meaning in the World’s Most Magnificent Bird, which details what happened after his family took on some pet peacocks. Flynn; his wife, Louise; and their two young sons already had two chickens, a dog and a cat—so when a friend asked if they wanted a peacock, they didn’t immediately say no. Before long, the family had adopted three: Carl, Mr. Pickle and Ethel.

Flynn, a longtime magazine journalist, often writes about emotional subjects, such as Arizona firefighters who died battling a wildfire or the 2011 domestic terrorist attack in Norway, and he doesn’t shy away from sentiment here either. Still, he approaches his subject with a science writer’s eye for detail. “The noise began in the middle of April,” he writes about the peacocks’ mating calls, for instance. “Mr. Pickle, a rising two-note burst, E above middle C, up to G, a quick slur down to F-sharp . . . not a plaintive cry, desperate and whiny, but assertive, a robust announcement; I am here.”

Flynn charts his own increasing obsession with the birds, the hours he spends each day in a lawn chair, aiming to entice the skittish peacocks to eat a blueberry out of his hand. When Carl becomes gravely ill, the endeavor to treat the peacock will be familiar to any pet owner who’s pondered the price of veterinary care, and yet far stranger. 

The narrative of Why Peacocks? alternates between this family’s story and more journalistic accounts, as Flynn leads us through a natural and cultural history of peacocks, including the evolution of male peacocks’ shimmering feather trains and the roles peacocks have played in religious traditions, making entertaining digressions along the way. He visits Palos Verdes, California, where peacocks have become a nuisance, and Dunfermline, Scotland, where a long-ago gift from Andrew Carnegie led to iconic peacocks in a public park.

Although this book is a quick read, it’s well researched with an extensive bibliography. Sweet and often funny, Why Peacocks? is an engaging mix of memoir, history and journalism.