Before anybody sees a tree kangaroo, there is a plane, then a smaller plane, then a helicopter or a long walk, then days of climbing through mud in a forest so wet that the clouds sit down in the branches. Gear gets carried. Camp gets built in the rain. That is a third of the book and it is not padding.
The animal at the end of it is the Matschie's tree kangaroo, which lives in the Huon Peninsula cloud forest of Papua New Guinea. It is a marsupial that climbs trees. The team is there to catch a few, fit radio collars, take measurements and samples, and let them go, so that somebody can eventually say where these animals go and how many are left. The book is a 2007 Sibert Honor Book, which is the award for nonfiction for children.
The scientist leading it has asthma bad enough to be a real problem at that altitude, in that damp, carrying that much. She goes anyway. A child who thinks fieldwork is for people who are strong and never scared should meet her.
The science it actually teaches
The anatomy first, because it is a good puzzle and your child can solve most of it from the photographs.
A ground kangaroo hops, and when it hops both back legs move together, locked. It cannot walk. A tree kangaroo can move its hind legs one at a time, which is the whole difference between a trunk and a field. Its front legs are nearly as long as its back ones, its claws are curved for gripping, its soles are rubbery, and its tail is not a spring but a counterweight, held out for balance. Same family, rebuilt for vertical.
Then the food, which explains the animal's behavior better than anything else. Leaves and epiphytes are poor fuel. There is not much energy in a leaf, so a leaf eater moves slowly and sleeps a great deal, and that is not laziness, it is arithmetic.
The forest itself is the third piece. A cloud forest is a sponge. Moss and epiphytes soak up water out of the cloud that sits in the canopy and let it down slowly into the rivers below, which is why what happens to trees on a mountain shows up in the water of villages nowhere near it.
The method is where this book separates from every wildlife documentary your child has watched. You do not follow a tree kangaroo around. You catch one, you weigh it in a bag, you check its pouch, you take a small blood sample, you fit a collar, and then you never see it again. Everything you learn afterward arrives as a radio signal and a compass bearing, and you build a map of an animal's life out of dots. Months of dots.
And the part almost nobody puts in a children's book: the forest belongs to people. Village clans own that land. The men who can find a tree kangaroo in it are hunters, and their knowledge is the instrument the science runs on. No agreement with the landowners, no research, and no protected forest either. Whether the animal survives is a question about people, and the book does not hide that behind the pretty photographs.
The child it lands with
If you have a child who says they want to work with animals when they grow up, this is the book that tells them the truth about it, kindly, without talking them out of anything.
The truth is mud, permits, hauling, and a great deal of nothing happening. It is also getting to hold an animal that almost no one on earth has held. Both of those are on the page in the same week. A child who reads that and still wants the job wants it for the right reasons.
It is a slower read than the cover suggests. There is no chase and no crisis. If your child needs a plot, read it in short sittings and treat the photographs as the spine.
One place to stop and talk
There is a page where nothing can happen until the villagers agree to it. That is the one. Put a single question on the table there: who owns a forest?
Then leave it alone. Do not rescue your child from the answer. It is a genuinely hard question and adults have not settled it either.
What to know going in
Nothing in this book is frightening, and there are things to think about.
Wild animals are caught, handled, and released, and the book is straight about the fact that this carries risk for the animal and is judged worth it for what the collars will show. If your child is tender about animals being bothered by people, that is a conversation, not a warning.
Hunting is discussed openly. Tree kangaroos have long been hunted for food by the people who live there, and some of the men helping the researchers have hunted them. The book does not turn anybody into a villain for that, and a child who arrives with a firm opinion about hunting will have it complicated. Good.
Extinction is the whole reason the work exists, so habitat loss and the possibility of losing this animal sit under every chapter. There are also leeches, mud, sickness and rain in the human end of the story, described cheerfully.
Where to get it
$11.99 in paperback at The Quest for the Tree Kangaroo. Buy this one for the child who has announced a career rather than for the child who is currently obsessed with an animal, because the animal is honestly not the best part. The best part is the packing list, the asking, and the waiting. If your house already has a pile of animal books doing nothing, add this one and let it argue with them from the Stealth Science shelf.
If your child liked this one
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Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
