Waffle-nosed and spindly legged, often weighing well over 400 kilograms and munching its way through more than 30 kg of food every day, the moose is a splendid beast. It is also an excellent animal for John Pastor to focus on in his evocative, multilayered and fascinating book, What Should a Clever Moose Eat? Pastor is a long-time explorer of North America's great northern forests in both the physical sense and the academic. Here, he shows the area's complexities and the ecological interplays between multiple species. He also shows how these are moulded by geological history and factors such as the fluctuations in population size of lynx and hares, and the frequency of forest fires. Pastor progressively pieces together the region's delicate ecological jigsaw puzzle. We come to understand the connections between past glacial events and current soil varieties, how these determine forest types, and what the size, shape and distribution of the resulting patchwork of vegetation do to the abundance and spread of animal life.
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