KP2's life begins much as any other monk seal pup; after 10 months of gestation, the seal's mother crawls up onto a nursing beach on Kauai, and KP2 slides from between his mother's back flippers, still slippery and wet and covered in thick black fetal fur. As he begins to stretch out his flippers and get accustomed to his new world, KP2's world changes suddenly as a large male seal—perhaps his father—attacks the young seal pup, almost killing him. KP's cries to his mother for help and for food go unanswered for two days before a group of biologists from the Kauai Monk Seal Team rescue the young pup, whisking him off to a safe place and eventually to Molokai, where the growing seal can be weaned from his dependence on humans in order to be released again to swim with the whales and dolphins.

Working in Antarctica, marine biologist Terrie Williams receives an e-mail from the National Marine Fisheries Service asking if she would like to care for and observe an orphaned monk seal pup in her lab in Santa Cruz, California. Although she has a few initial reservations, especially concerning the cost of transporting the seal from Hawaii to California, she accepts the offer and her adventure with KP2 soon begins. She discovers that very little research has been done on the critically endangered Hawaiian monk seals because of bureaucratic red tape. The same law that lists the seals as an endangered species also prevents humans from touching them. Since KP2 is in captivity in Williams' lab, however, she can study his species in detail and through understanding make progress in saving his species.

In her poignant, forceful and very often hilarious memoir, The Odyssey of KP2, Williams shares her attempts to avoid emotional involvement with the lovable seal as she tries to maintain proper distance from the creature in her scientific experiments. After two years of watching KP2 grow from youngster to mature adult, Williams recognizes that this playful monk seal—which is going blind—can never return to the wild, but she also realizes that he must be returned to his islands. The islanders happily greet the adorable and sociable KP2 as he enters his new home at the Waikiki Aquarium.

Even as her encounter with KP2 teaches Williams more about herself and her work, her inspiring memoir teaches us that the more we are able to read the world around us, the solutions for the preservation of the oceans and the conservation of monk seals and the remaining animals of the world will come naturally.

On a subfreezing night in early December 1997, a gigantic Amur tiger killed and devoured a beekeeper and hunter named Vladimir Markov just outside his cabin in a forest in the Russian territory of Primorye, near the borders of China and North Korea. This is the event around which John Vaillant’s The Tiger is coiled. Markov’s death activated a unit of the Russian conservation service known as Inspection Tiger, then headed by the dogged and charismatic ex-soldier Yuri Trush. It became Trush’s duty to track down and subdue the tiger before it killed again. In this, he failed, although there would be an ultimate face-to-face confrontation between the man and the beast.

“To properly appreciate such an animal,” Vaillant writes, “picture the grotesquely muscled head of a pit bull and then imagine how it might look if the pit bull weighed a quarter of a ton. Add to this fangs the length of a finger backed up by rows of slicing teeth capable of cutting through the heaviest bone. Consider then the claws: a hybrid of meat hook and stiletto that can attain four inches along the outer curve. . . . Now, imagine the vehicle for all this: nine feet or more from nose to tail, and three and a half feet high at the shoulder.”

Vaillant unspools his story in several strands. In addition to giving an hour-by-hour account of the hunt, he also describes in considerable detail the landscape and history of this incredibly remote, exotic and inhospitable region. He explains the impact the breakup of the Soviet Union has had on efforts to conserve the tiger’s habitat and probes the mentality and motivation of those who wrest a living from this resource-rich—and thus endangered—frontier. Most absorbing, though, are Vaillant’s musings on whether this particular tiger sought out and attacked specific human beings as deliberate acts of revenge. Had the victims, in effect, courted their own destruction? This question leads to other discussions of how humans and animals behave toward each other in stressful environments.

As digressive and far-ranging as Vaillant’s narrative is, it never shifts for long from the tiger he has crouching at the edge of the reader’s imagination.

What appears on our national and global dinner plates has come under intense scrutiny in the last decade, as many of the world’s food production practices are devastating the natural abundance and health of planet Earth. In the wake of such eye-opening books as Mark Kurlansky’s Cod and, more recently, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals comes journalist Paul Greenberg’s excellent investigation into global fisheries and fishing practices, Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food.

Admittedly, Greenberg is a fish guy. As a youngster he avidly fished for bass, first in a pristine pond near his Connecticut home; then, as a teenager, he took to the sea in a beat-up aluminum boat. “I thought of the sea,” he writes, “as a vessel of desires and mystery, a place of abundance I did not need to question.”

But boys grow up, and other interests crowd out childhood passions. The allure of fishing faded until Greenberg decided to revive the habit in the early 2000s. Returning to his former fishing grounds, he found that the flounder, blackfish and mackerel that he used to catch in abundance had moved on, dwindled or disappeared. He traveled up and down the Eastern Seaboard and down into Florida, “fishing all the way” and meeting many fisherman, all of whom had the same complaint: “Smaller fish, fewer of them, shorter fishing windows . . . fewer species to catch.”

Visiting fish markets (another childhood habit), Greenberg noted that “four varieties of fish consistently appeared that had little to do with the waters adjacent to the fish market in question: salmon, sea bass, cod and tuna.” Over the next decade, he determined to find out why “this peculiarly consistent flow of four fish from the different waters of the globe” was ending up on our dinner plate.

What follows is an extraordinarily attentive, witty, sensitive and commonsense narrative about salmon, sea bass, cod and tuna that covers their origination, life cycles and the ever-evolving saga of their exploitation by humans. Backed by rigorous research and enlivened by Greenberg’s man-on-the-spot reportage, the book charts the history and rise of the world’s appetite for these four fish, the industrial fishing practices and the “epochal shifts” in these fish populations—from habitat damage and overfishing of the last wild stocks to the often dubious farming and aquaculture enterprises that now dominate the fish production marketplace.

While Greenberg believes that we need the oceans’ harvest to feed an ever-increasing human population, he acknowledges that a “primitive” human greed has helped land us in an ecological tangle. But this inspiring book doesn’t just diagnose the problem; Greenberg puts forth an ameliorating set of principles that can help us to live in better balance with the “wild oceans” that sustain us.

Magellan, Amundsen, Armstrong: If the mere mention of these names ignites your passion for exploration, discovery and adventure, James M. Tabor’s latest book will indulge you on all counts and then some. Blind Descent chronicles the deadly dangerous, awe-inspiring quest to reach the Earth’s core and the race to get there first by two fiercely competitive men of polar-opposite personalities—the quiet, self-effacing Ukrainian, Alexander Klimchouk, and Bill Stone, the brash, commanding (and sometimes controversial) American.

Far beyond the relative tameness of commercial caves or even the daunting challenges of spelunking, this mission takes the men and their teams “thousands of feet deep and many miles long” into the uncharted subterranean mysteries of the supercave. Danger is ever-present; falling, flooding, asphyxiation, hurricane-force winds, hypothermia and the “particularly insidious derangement called The Rapture” (to name just a few of the many hazards) pose ongoing threats to life and limb. Compounding the tension and peril is the added menace of living and maneuvering in unrelenting, unnerving darkness.

Tabor’s you-are-there style captures the excitement of these expeditions with the immediacy of an Indiana Jones movie, and the ensuing human dramas which unfold—deaths, divorces, liaisons and love affairs—are equally compelling. He also deftly handles the science involved, explaining how these endeavors offer important insight into subjects ranging from pandemic prevention to new petroleum preserves. And then there’s the ever-evolving equipment angle, like the dogged, problem-solving Bill Stone’s invention of the MK1 rebreather, the breakthrough technology that first thrilled divers in 1987 when Stone stayed underwater an incredible 24 hours. The device now allows cavers to get past the formidable underground rivers and lakes that previously blocked their passage to greater depths.

“Caves are scientific cornucopias,” Tabor writes, but “only quite recently have sophisticated batteries and digital recording technology made it possible to take cameras far down into supercaves,” bringing these expeditions the kind of attention their “mountaineering, aquanaut, and astronaut counterparts” have long enjoyed. In Blind Descent, Tabor’s access to actual video footage and photographs (some stunning examples are included) as well as logs and journals enhance his exhilarating prose. A former contributing editor to Outside magazine and Ski magazine, and the writer and host of the popular PBS series “The Great Outdoors,” Tabor’s many talents culminate in this risk-it-all tale of tragedy and triumph.

If an Archaeopteryx of the Late Jurassic Period perched on our rooftops, we’d surely take notice. But rushing around, we often fail to see birds—the only wild animals that we encounter every day, and a link to our prehistoric past—eating berries from backyard bushes, drinking from puddles and raising young in delicate nests of stray hairs and blades of grass. It’s a subject ripe with possibility for noted naturalist and writer Sy Montgomery (The Good Good Pig). Her new book, Birdology, reconnects readers with the “winged aliens” that fill our lives with movement, song and mystery.

Each chapter reveals a fundamental truth about birds, such as Birds are Individuals (Chickens), Birds are Dinosaurs (Cassowary), Birds are Made of Air (Hummingbirds) and Birds Can Talk (Parrots). Montgomery draws a line from her beloved childhood parakeet Jerry to her current barnyard full of gregarious chickens and beyond, focusing on one aspect of these common birds’ anatomy, physiology or behavior—the hawk’s incredible eyesight, the amazing architecture of hummingbird wings—to hint at the larger wonders and mysteries of the approximately 10,000 living bird species. Her reporting takes her to a wildlife rehabilitator in California who specializes in baby hummingbirds the size of a bumblebee; to Australia to track down the dinosaur-throwback cassowary; to New England to hunt with birds of prey. She gets a seat at the start line at a Boston-area pigeon race, allows a dangerous Harris hawk to perch on her leather-covered hand and dances with a cockatoo. “Although we are separated by 325 million years of evolution,” she writes, “Snowball and I move together, as if in a mirror.”

The often poetic, relaxed elegance of her observations make this adventure into the science and natural history of birds deeply satisfying. Whether keeping watch over a newly relaunched hummingbird until he is “just a silhouette that dissolves into the soft, moonlit night” or putting a hood on a bird, “like extinguishing a candle,” Montgomery’s microscope reveals feathered creatures with intellectual and emotional abilities remarkably like ours, animals that “stir our souls in ways that change our lives.”

Deanna Larson writes from Nashville.

Philip Hoare’s literary and cultural history of the world’s largest and oldest animal may lead you to brush up on your sea chanteys and protest ballads simultaneously. The Whale, already winner of the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction in England, should be welcomed by American readers on both coasts and all points in between. Hoare follows his passion for whales around the world and back through time, beginning with and continually touching on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick for source material and inspiration. The book is liberally peppered with quotes that are guaranteed to bring new readers to the classic novel and send long-time fans back for another voyage on The Pequod.

The Whale explores the history of the whaling industry and the systemic abuse and harm humans have done to what is arguably the gentlest mammal known to man; the details are often heartbreaking, even when they’re offset by thrilling descriptions of the dangers of life at sea. Hoare visits historic whaling towns in multiple countries and actually swims with whales, and his personal accounts and sheer delight in his experiences lighten the mood. Readers will appreciate the ironic plot twist when what ultimately saves the whales from extinction turns out to be the discovery of crude oil.

There’s a generous smattering of scientific and biological information spread throughout the book; but the most amazing fact of all is how little humans actually know about whales. Hoare writes, “We would do well to remember that the world harbours animals bigger than ourselves, which we have yet to see; that not everything is catalogued and claimed and digitalized. That in the oceans great whales swim unnamed by man.” Yet another reason to be humble in their amazing presence.

Heather Seggel reads and writes in Ukiah, California.

The back-to-the-land movement was nearing its peak in 1971, when Susan Hand Shetterly, her husband and their young son moved to a small cabin in coastal Maine with “no electricity, no plumbing, no phone.” Almost 40 years later, unlike most of her peers who soon beat a retreat back to urban comfort, Shetterly still calls Maine home, a word that resonates powerfully throughout Settled in the Wild, her clear-eyed and loving tribute to the land, wildlife and people of her adopted community.

Though the essays in Settled in the Wild touch on the stuff of memoir—a second child, a divorce and work as a teacher, writer and wild bird rehabilitator—Shetterly focuses most acutely on the natural world she inhabits: walking, swimming, caring for animals, chopping trees and, always, observing. Whether she is telling the story of an injured raven who gradually leaves her care for the wild, describing the dead tree outside her kitchen window which turns out to be an ecosystem of its own or observing her neighbors as they navigate the changes that come with the development some welcome and others resist, Shetterly’s nuanced and attentive prose brings her world to life.

Over the course of the book, several related themes emerge. Like Shetterly, who believed from childhood that she belonged in the country, the book’s eels, alewives, ravens and dogs have an innate, even ancestral sense of home. However, their homes are shared, and the sharing is not always pretty: Settled in the Wild is full of dead and injured animals, some harmed by people, some by other animals who hunt, kill and eat as nature intends them to do. Human intervention, on the other hand, takes nature in unforeseen directions. “Cormorants,” one of the book’s most powerful essays, details the ups and downs of local bird populations, undone and restored by the acts of people whose solutions to problems inevitably create new problems, leaving Shetterly, finally, “in hell.” For her readers, though, this wise and subtle book is a gem: beautiful, insightful and realistic, a lesson in embracing the world as it is while envisioning how it might be.

Rebecca Steinitz is a writer in Arlington, Massachusetts.