The premise is a line from American naturalist Henry Beston: Animals aren’t underlings, they’re other nations. Huling takes it literally and spends a year mapping their territories — Canada’s beaver belt, the tunnel complexes of sub-Saharan mole-rats, prairie dog cities inside the sprawl of the American Southwest, Argentine ant supercolonies fighting border wars, migration corridors across the Eurasian steppe that work like the Silk Road. Oliver Uberti, formerly of National Geographic, drew the maps, and they reinforce the point, displaying a version of the world where the land we call uninhabited is full of settled, organized populations that were there first.
Hidden Nations of Animals