The Beast in the Garden – David Baron

The temperature had reached 60 degrees for the first time in months, and I was itching to grill pork chops. Stepping onto the back porch of my home around 7:30 p.m. — just three miles south from an urban center — I was struck by the darkness and quiet of my backyard.

As I fussed with the grill’s electric starter, temperamental after months of no use, my neighbor’s dog started a slow bark that soon reached a frenzy before ending abruptly. Had I not been reading David Baron’s absolutely phenomenal “The Beast in the Garden,” I wouldn’t have given the moment a second thought, but instead I peered cautiously over my porch railing convinced that a mountain lion had claimed the canine as prey.

Baron’s nonfiction account of how mountain lions descended the Rocky Mountain foothills into Boulder, Colo., neighborhoods is the best environmental nonfiction book I’ve read, and, quite frankly, one of the finest nonfiction books I’ve read — and that’s a genre I frequent.

Seemingly unfazed by humans, the mountain lions’ natural hunting instincts shifted from deer to domestic animals, and over the course of two years residents would witness an ever-escalating ecological calamity that would come to a head on a running trail.

Baron presents the events as a tense, slowly unfolding disaster complete with disagreeing citizens, unconcerned politicians and a few people determined to raise the alarm. If you replaced great white shark in “Jaws” with a group of mountain lions, the plot of that movie (I haven’t read the original) and this book would be eerily similar.

Unlike Timothy C. Winegard’s “The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator” and Dan Egan’s “The Death and Life of the Great Lakes,” that often lacked focus and bogged the reader down with minutiae, Baron keeps the narrative tight and focused.

While some chapters might contain a few pages about the United States’ history with mountain lions, or President Theodore Roosevelt’s legacy of conservation that influenced modern approaches to human and wildlife symbiosis, the focus stays on Boulder in the late-1980s and early-1990s, and the political and environmental situation that led to the proliferation of urban mountain lions.

While Baron does have a few writing flourishes that seemed a bit extra — for example, he starts one chapter with “Two days after the old year yielded to the new…” — the  narrative is well-researched, accessibly written, and frankly, terrifying.

Oftentimes while reading about the mountain lion encounters my pulse raced, and the events seeped into my consciousness as is clear by my absurd thought the night I stepped on to my porch to grill. Although my fears are not completely unfounded as a mountain lion was spotted near my home in May 2019.

This is a nonfiction book that on the surface appears to be about one, rather niche micro-history, but it speaks to a bigger discussion — how humans are impacting wild animals from the ice caps to our backyards.

As someone that’s lived in densely populated areas my entire life, the assorted rabbits, squirrels, chipmunks, birds — both of song and prey — and the occasional deer, opossum or raccoon don’t raise many alarms. But the decisions we make about our “land” can have devastating consequences to our local ecosystem. Reading this raised my “think global, act local” consciousness.

Rating (story): 4.5/5 stars

Rating (narration): N/A

Formats: Paperback (Personal library)

Dates read: February 20 – March 14, 2021

Multi-tasking: N/A