Lyall Watson

Lyall Watson (12 April 1939 – 25 June 2008) was a South African botanist, zoologist, biologist, anthropologist, ethologist, and author of many books, among the most popular of which is the best seller Supernature. Lyall Watson tried to make sense of natural and supernatural phenomena in biological terms. He is credited with coining the "hundredth monkey" effect in his 1979 book, Lifetide; later, in The Whole Earth Review, he conceded this was "a metaphor of my own making".

Born in Johannesburg in South Africa, full name Malcolm Lyall-Watson, he had an early fascination for nature in the surrounding bush and learned much from a Zulu minder, who taught him bushcraft and native African animism from an early age. Watson attended boarding school at Rondebosch Boys' High School in Cape Town from the age of ten, completing his studies in 1955. He enrolled at the University of the Witwatersrand at the age of 16 where, by the time he was 20, he had earned degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand and from the University of Natal (now the University of KwaZulu-Natal).

At the University of the Witwatersrand he had studied under Raymond Dart, leading on to postgraduate anthropological studies in Germany and the Netherlands. He completed a doctorate in ethology at the University of London, under Desmond Morris. He also worked at the BBC writing and producing nature documentaries, and for many years he spent seasons as an expedition leader and resident biologist on board the MS Lindblad Explorer, leading to the publication of a textbook for the general reader on Whales of the World in 1981. He was involved in setting up the Indian Ocean Whale Sanctuary, and in 1977 was appointed as the Seychelles Commissioner for Whales.

Watson wrote twenty-four books in all, during a writing career which spanned four decades.

Life

Childhood (1939–55)

Born on 12 April 1939, in Johannesburg, South Africa, Watson, born Malcolm Lyall-Watson, was the eldest of three brothers. His father, Doug Lyall-Watson, was an architect who served abroad during World War II with the British Royal Air Force (RAF). Douglas Lyall-Watson was of Scottish ancestry, although five generations removed from his Scottish roots.

Watson spent his memorable childhood on his maternal grandparents' ranch in a corner of the Transvaal that borders Mozambique and Swaziland, where his mother Mary helped to run the large farm for her aging parents. His grandmother Ouma, Afrikaans for "old ma", English name Grace, was interviewed by the authorities once for defacing postage stamps; she was accustomed to drawing devil's horns on the portrait of the statesman who instigated apartheid, before posting her letters. Watson was often placed in the care of an elderly Zulu, the son of a tribal chief, who taught the inquisitive boy bush craft, gave him the nickname Mbuzi, meaning "The Goat" because of his delight in sampling and exploring everything, and impressed him with the animistic ideas of African tribal culture. It was during summer breaks from Rondebosch Boys' High School, spending a month unsupervised with a dozen other boys from his local district on a beach in Plettenberg Bay, in the southeast corner of the Western Cape, that Watson developed his thirst to explore, and learned the independence of thought that stayed with him all his life. Already, at the age of nine, on his grandparents' farm, his grandmother had taken him to the chief of a local tribal community who had been a life-long friend of hers, to be initiated into adulthood with all the other boys of the village. By the time he went to boarding school, he was fluent in Afrikaans, English and Zulu.

Higher education (1955–60)

At Rondebosch Boys' High School Watson's academic progress caused him to jump over a year and consequently he finished his studies a year early, at the age of fifteen. His father allowed him to travel before starting at university, and the fifteen-year-old indulged a growing passion for elephants by visiting the only two areas in the southern Cape still to have them.

Watson came to realize that his interests lay in zoology and anthropology rather than in medicine, and he completed his BSc degree at the University of the Witwatersrand having taken courses in a wide range of subjects including botany, zoology, geology, geography and even psychology.

Doctoral research (1960–1963)

By now Watson had developed a fascination with animal behaviour, and following his graduation at the University of Natal in South Africa he travelled to Germany to offer his services to the renowned ethologist Konrad Lorenz. But the fishes Lorentz set him to study did not satisfy Watson's interest in larger mammals, so he moved to Holland to study anthropology and from there to England and to Oxford, where the Dutch zoologist Niko Tinbergen, now a British citizen, headed a research team studying animal behaviour at Oxford University. Watson was offered a place there as a doctoral student on a project studying black-headed gulls, which did not fill him with much enthusiasm either. One of Tinbergen's former postgraduate students, Desmond Morris, had recently become Curator of Mammals at London Zoo, and it was arranged that Watson should became Morris's first PhD student. The title of his thesis was 'The ethology of food-hoarding mammals - with special reference to the green acouchi, "Myoprocta pratti"' The green acouchi is a South American rodent found in the Amazon basin.

In order to support himself during his studies in London, Watson worked during the evenings in the kitchen of a large London hotel, rising to the grade of souffle chef. Shortly after gaining his doctorate, and given his experience at London Zoo and his association with Desmond Morris, he was offered the job of Director of Johannesburg Zoo in his native South Africa.

Johannesburg Zoo (1964–1965)

It was very soon after completing his PhD in London that Watson was offered the position of Director of the Johannesburg Zoo, an offer he found too good to refuse, despite his distaste for the apartheid system. He served as director there from 1964 to 1965. During this time, despite bureaucratic obstacles and financial constraints, he oversaw an expansion of the elephant house, introducing two companions for a long-time resident there, a female elephant named Delilah, as well as a new lion enclosure and a wooded area for the wolves. The 1960s was a time of general improvement at the zoo, introducing larger and more natural enclosures, the development of education and environmental programmes and involvement in local and international breeding programmes. Following completion of the new lion enclosure, however, as Watson describes in his 1982 BBC radio interview for Desert Island Discs, attempts by the local authorities to impose racial segregation on visitors to the new enclosures caused friction between himself and wider authorities leading to a number of interviews with the police and his ultimate resignation. He left South Africa and went to the Seychelles.

Tomorrow's World (1966–1967)

By the summer of 1966, Watson was in London again and he joined the production team on the BBC's tech television magazine programme Tomorrow's World, on the same day as its longstanding-co-presenter-to-be, James Burke. Watson, however, was only there for a year before moving on.

Watson's marriage to Vivienne ended in 1966. Around this time he shortened his name to Lyall Watson.

Seychelles and Indonesia (1967–1971 )

Following his departure from the BBC, Watson's life goes off the radar for a while. But there are clues. He tried freelance film-making, shooting underwater archaeology in Greece and Turkey. Watson confesses in a 1982 BBC radio interview that he needed long periods spent alone.

In the summer of 1970 Watson worked as an expedition leader and scientist-in-residence for a travel company owned by Lars-Eric Lindblad, on board the MS Lindblad Explorer, leading onshore expeditions and giving lectures on board. Lindblad ran a travel company based in the USA offering worldwide adventure holidays to exotic and hitherto unvisited places. He was a keen conservationist and in 1971 was actively seeking new locations for his small new cruise ship the Lindblad Explorer to visit. Watson was recruited by him in the summer of 1971 to scout out locations to visit in the Seychelles and in the islands of Indonesia, as a commercial venture but also to raise awareness of the vulnerability of these places. Watson was approached because: "Not only did he have a vast knowledge of biology, but he had lived for some time in the Seychelles and Indonesia, and knew the islands and islanders well."

In his Desert Island Discs radio broadcast for the BBC, Watson mentions an MSc in Marine Biology as one of his degrees. Given his gravitation at this time towards the sea, as illustrated by his 1981 textbook Whales of the World, the fruit of ten years study on the Lindblad Explorer and elsewhere, it is possible that one of the years 1967 to 1969 may have been spent studying for this degree.

Supernature and the Lindblad Explorer (1971–1974)

MS Lindblad Explorer was launched in 1969. By 2005, when this photograph was taken, outside Scoresbysund in Greenland, she had been renamed the MS Explorer.

Watson wrote his two most popular books, Supernature and The Romeo Error, between 1971 and 1974.

The cruise ship MS Lindblad Explorer first arrived at Mahé in the Seychelles on 19 April 1970 and for the next two years "carried out twenty-four cruises between Mombasa [Kenya] and the Seychelles, with the naturalists on board emphasizing the need for protection of the locations we visited." but perhaps also scouting for Lindblad, who was looking at this time to sail the Lindblad Explorer from Fiji to the Philippines, as well as to New Guinea. In 1973, he was again scouting Indonesia for interesting ports of call for the Explorer, and in particular the Asmat region of West Irian, on the island of New Guinea. The summer of 1973 marked the Explorer's first voyage from Bali to New Guinea, and Watson was on board as expedition leader and naturalist. He entertained the young people on board by demonstrating the kinds of faces that monkeys make to show emotions like fear, anger and happiness. Watson remained convinced of Geller's spoon-bending and telekinetic powers until at least 1976, where he discusses Geller's powers in his book Gifts of Unknown Things. Doubt has subsequently been cast upon Geller's talents being anything more than stage magic.

Watson was soon to spend nine months marooned in the Banda Sea before returning to London to discover that Supernature had sold tens of thousands of copies and was being translated into many languages. His second book, The Romeo Error, published in 1974, complemented Supernature by being an exploration of biological death, using an eclectic mix of biology and the paranormal in the same way that Supernature had been an exploration of biological life in the same vein and from the same standpoint. Given its publication in 1974, it is likely that The Romeo Error was written and submitted to publishers before his prolonged stay on the Indonesian island that he chose to call Nus Tarian when he wrote about this experience in his book Gifts of Unknown Things.

Gifts and Whales (1974–1981)

Cousin Island, in the Seychelles, has been the focus of wildlife conservation efforts since its Seychelles Warbler population first received protection in 1968. 1974. Publication of The Romeo Error.

1976. Publication of Gifts of Unknown Things.

Nine months on Nus Tarion, shipwrecked from a native dhow, possibly while scouting for Lindblad. Lindblad Explorer cruises to Indonesia continued successfully for years, continually finding new places to visit, sometimes "on islands whose inhabitants had never seen a large ship or a doctor before".

In the mid-1980s, having earlier been approached by the American landscape photographer Jerry Derbyshire with an offer of collaboration, Watson appeared unannounced at Derbyshire's home in Austin, Texas, quickly rented a nearby apartment and spent six weeks writing the text for The Water Planet.

Watson signs his book Heaven's Breath: "Lyall Watson, Kyoto, Japan, 1983". In its final chapter he makes clear his familiarity and affinity with Japanese Shinto belief, which he regards as the last surviving refuge of a fully functioning animistic belief system, all others around the world having provided for anthropologists only fragments of a dying tradition. Watson's book Bali Entranced: A Celebration of Ritual was published in 1985, in Japanese only.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s Watson presented Channel 4's coverage of sumo tournaments.

Ireland, New Mexico and the Amazon (1991–2008)

Watson's introduction to his book Dark Nature, published in 1995, is signed " LYALL WATSON, On the Amazon. The Amazon was a converted fishing vessel that Watson used to sail the oceans during this period. His 2004 publication The Whole Hog lists his domicile, during suitable parts of the year, as "a cliff-top cottage on the rocky west coast of Ireland [and] an adobe ranch-house on the high desert of New Mexico".

Watson married Vivienne Mawson in 1961, and they divorced in 1966. His second wife was Jacquey Visick, and his third wife, Alice Coogan, died in 2003. He was the eldest of three brothers, one of whom (Andrew) lived in Gympie, Queensland, Australia. It was while visiting Andrew that he died of a stroke on 25 June 2008.

Writing career Watson began writing his first book, Omnivore, during the early 1960s while under the supervision of Desmond Morris, and wrote more than 21 others.

Supernature (1973)

Watson began writing Supernature while visiting Greece in the summer of 1971. He was intending to honour a longstanding arrangement to rendezvous at the Temple of Zeus in Athens at the midsummer solstice with a Russian countess he had met nine years earlier, now married with children. Beforehand, he was seen on the island of Sifnos in the Cyclades, "white pants and a canvas sea bag", but had difficulty finding a publisher for it. Its introduction is signed "Lyall Watson, Ph.D. Ios, Greece, 1971". It is possible that, at this time, Watson was also doing freelance filming of underwater archaeology in the Aegean. In doing so, he betrays what must have been a prior and longstanding interest of his in the paranormal, a familiarity with the results of related experiments reported both in mainstream scientific journals and in journals such as the Journal of Parapsychology, which he cites.

With equal enthusiasm lies Watson's belief in telepathy. Near the very beginning of the book he writes: "...there is a continuous communication not only between living things and their environment, but amongst all things living in that environment. An intricate web of interaction connects all life into one vast, self-maintaining system. Each part is related to every other part and we are all part of the whole, part of Supernature."

Gifts of Unknown Things (1976)

Unable to interest publishers in Supernature, Watson continued his work with Eric Lindblad and by 1973, following exploratory surveys and then a voyage for Lindblad to Indonesia and the Banda Sea, he returned to London to find that Supernature had at last found a publisher. In his book The Romeo Error, written in Bali, Indonesia, in 1974, he writes: "I have questioned a child on a remote Indonesian island, who was said to have special powers..." and goes on to describe her showing him what people looked like to her, with 'fires' located at points on the body corresponding to Indian Yogi tradition, although no such knowledge existed on the island community she lived in.

As an illustration of its being "at once scientific exploration and imaginative adventure", he writes. This leads him to propose a theory in which all life is interconnected, and he uses the hologram as an analogy, in which every part contains, within itself, the whole.

Lifetide

Lifetide was published in 1979 and continued Watson's exploration of the interface between biology, zoology, extrasensory perception and the supernatural. It was in this book that his concept of a spontaneous acquisition of knowledge by an organism through the transmission of unconscious thoughts, mirroring C G Jung's collective unconscious, was coined the 'Hundredth Monkey'. It rested on an example of an acquired behavior in monkeys that was later disputed.

Other writings

Nature and the paranormal

The Romeo Error (1974)

The Romeo Error was reprinted with revisions in 1976 as a Coronet edition and again in 1987 as a Sceptre edition, called The Biology of Death. In these books, Watson explains how it is impossible to state with certainty an exact moment of death and gives many historical accounts of people waking from presumed death. It is equally impossible, he argues, to say where on the scale of biochemical organisation, from complex molecules to viruses, bacteria, simple cells and multicellular organisms, life truly begins. This 'second system', as he calls it, may be involved in the specific organisation of cells in all multicellular bodies and be the seat of long-term memories in higher mammals, for which no suitable location (in the 1970s) had been found in the brain. It might also be responsible for phenomena such as out-of-body experiences, psychokinesis, ghostly apparitions and spiritual healing. This second system may be observable, he claims. as an 'aura' extending from the human body seen by mystics and spiritualists, and might equate with a 'bioplasma' which can be detected electromagnetically. It can outlast physical death but will deteriorate following clinical death, whenever this moment is placed, although he acknowledges that the often consistent accounts of near-death experiences might be linked to chemical changes in an oxygen-starved brain experienced before consciousness returns. This second system cannot, in his view, be equated with a soul. So no personal soul. This conforms with the Buddhist theory of 'no soul'. But The Romeo Error is clearly focused on Watson's second system, "that the body must operate on at least one other level beyond the one we know [as] the physical or somatic system." and that "it seems to make biological sense to assume that the second system's time is as limited as the first."

In an urge to explore all lines of enquiry with equal objectivity, Watson has been accused of credulity. He spent many months in the Philippines during the 1970s with Spiritualist healers; however, not with native Hilot healers but mostly with a Christian sect associated with a Spiritist Society started in 1857 by a French mystic known as Allan Kardec,

Biology and natural history

Omnivore (1971)

Omnivore: The Role of Food in Human Evolution was first published in 1971, the same year that Watson wrote Supernature. It was begun during the early 1960s

The book has been criticized for overzealous application of this main idea: "that all aspects of man's behaviour can be explained in terms of feeding alone. Such reductionism inevitably leads to gross overstatements...". And already Watson is willing to include beliefs that stray from biological orthodoxy. Following a description of elephants' ability to dig for and find water in dried-up stream beds, he adds: "Experiments with human water diviners show that we respond to the electromagnetic field set up by running water." The book is dedicated to "[the MS Lindblad Explorer] and to her officers and crew", whose adventure cruises around the globe for the previous ten years had included them both as resident naturalists. These voyages, he writes, "made it possible for us to get close to most of the world's living whales, dolphins and porpoises in their natural habitats." Tom Ritchie's illustrations have also come in for some criticism, amongst general accolades, for a sometimes excessive and unrealistic use of colour and contrast.

Heaven's Breath (1984)

A look at the wind, from every conceivable direction. Written in an engaging and often humorous style for the general reader, packed with facts and anecdotes, and awarded Bernard Levin's Book of the Year for the British Sunday Newspaper The Observer in 1984. "In Heaven's Breath, Lyall Watson blends science, history, folklore and anecdote to explore the many wonders of wind."

The Earth's atmosphere has changed considerably over the planet's history and seems to be part of a thermostatic control allowing life on Earth to have maintained, and still maintain, a suitable temperature for itself, despite changing solar intensity. Watson reveals himself as a fully paid-up member of James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis. The movement of this atmosphere, the wind, carries heat from the equator to the poles, allowing for temperatures suitable for life almost everywhere on the planet. The troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere and ionosphere blanket the Earth, winds in the troposphere distribute heat and provide both predictability and endless variety to weather systems at the surface. The wind gave the Fertile crescent in the Middle East its nurturing westerlies as the northern ice melted ten thousand years ago; it dictated the pattern of human migration into the pacific four thousand years ago, gave sails to European explorers and brought unexpected relief to the Japanese from seaborne invasion in AD 1274. Windmills spread all over Europe in the late Middle Ages and now give the promise of widespread electric power generation from wind farms.

In addition to salt, clay particles, sand and extraterrestrial dust, wind contains a myriad of tiny living things, including pollen, bacteria, viruses and fungal spores, as well as millions upon millions of tiny insects that use the wind everywhere, to migrate and to propagate. A large number of plants and trees ensure widespread dispersal of their seed through the agency of the wind. The wind propels spiders who take to the air on gossamer sails, it is alive with insects, birds and bats, determining the direction and timing of migration routes, and just as surely casting pioneering individuals upon unexpected shores. Varying wind strength affects humans and animals in many ways, changing behaviour, determining habitat, dispersing man-made pollutants and mixing gasses that cause acid rain and fuel the Greenhouse Effect. Named winds, like the Sirocco, affect human mood and psychology through a sudden alteration in humidity, temperature, turbidity, purity or state of ionization. There are strangely similar wind creation myths from all over the world; the Greeks and Romans personified four cardinal winds and gave each a personality. English literature has preferred a more natural evocation, as have the paintings of John Constable, William Turner, and the music of Berlioz and Debussy.

The Water Planet: a Celebration of the Wonder of Water (1988)

A coffee table book, or perhaps a teenager's introduction to Earth Science. Written in easily comprehensible text, the pages are filled with revealing facts and figures about water, and copiously illustrated by the American landscape photographer Jerry Derbyshire. Like Heaven's Breath, it takes a property of the Earth, in this case the planet's water, and studies its form and behaviour from every possible angle: physical properties, chemical idiosyncrasies, erosion, meteorology, ice and glaciation, rivers and lakes, the hydrological cycle, biology, its passage through plants and trees, biochemistry, atmospheric physics, geography, its role in human evolution, the development of agriculture, and its celebration in religion, mythology and literature.

Published in America in 1988. Watson and Derbyshire had plans to extend this work into a series of four: Earth, Air, Fire and Water, an ambition that was cut short by Derbyshire's death in 1989.

Dark Nature (1995)

Perhaps the most mainstream of Watson's extended, exploratory musings on biology and life in general, Dark Nature has also been described as 'groundbreaking' and 'fascinating'. It was written on board his converted ocean-going trawler Amazon and takes a look at the nature of evil from the viewpoint of a naturalist, evolutionary zoologist and anthropologist. Taking in also psychology, philosophy, history and the works of literary authors, the book was inspired, perhaps, by the Rwandan genocide in 1994 and the murder of three-year-old James Bulger by two ten-year-old boys early in 1993, which he discusses in some depth. But recent technical and cultural advances in human society have not had time to adapt to and take into consideration basic human instincts, leading to industrial-scale warfare, the use of guns in impulsive homicide, incitement to mass murder and the Holocaust. If the next few decades can be safely negotiated, Watson suggests, cultural evolution may become more important than genetic evolution in our rapidly evolving species, ideas will become the new genes, to be selected for or against according to their survival value, natural instincts brought under control and a sustainable balance achieved between 'nature' and 'nurture'. A stable ecology in a human dominated world that will act for the benefit of both individual, society and the planet.

The Whole Hog: Exploring the Extraordinary Potential of Pigs (2004)

Watson's final book was published in 2004. The Whole Hog is a celebration of pigs, both wild and domestic. He describes all sixteen species of wild pigs, including the American peccaries, the many island species found in Indonesia, the five species of African pigs and the European wild boar (from which most farm pigs are derived), explaining their evolutionary history, their habits and their behaviour in the wild. Pigs began to be domesticated in broadly the same era as dogs, about 20,000 years ago. In addition to studies and observations as a zoologist and naturalist, Watson introduces three pigs that he has kept as pets over the years: Hoover the warthog in Africa, anecdotes of whom fill the early childhood section of his autobiography Warriors, Warthogs and Wisdom; That was published in 1981. By 2004, Watson is clearly conceding consciousness to other mammals as well. Speaking of Salsa, his Mexican peccary, Watson writes that "he discovered the possibilities that opened up with each new opportunity, and I could see the intelligence growing in his eyes... " Later in the book he writes: "Pigs are aware beings, individuals with minds of their own... [but] we keep missing the point, unable to get around the confusion that lies between 'pig' and 'pork', between being conscious and being bacon."

Biography and autobiography

Lightning Bird (1982)

Adrian Boshier was raised in England, but when his mother married again and took her son to 1950s South Africa, he purposely wandered into the African bush aged 16 and lived off the land, learning the hard way how to survive. anatomist and anthropologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and turned each of his subsequent wanderings into something of an anthropological field trip for Dart. He was appointed a field officer to the Museum of Man and Science and reported to Dart with each return to Johannesburg. He was an epileptic and died on 18 November 1978 on the shores of the Indian ocean, probably as a result of a seizure. to go through a "collection of tattered diaries and some notes towards the first draft of a book"

It is 'ostensibly' a biography because it is more than that as well. It has been accused of over-romanticizing Boshier's life, "and indeed his pen soars in passages that capture the harsh beauty of landscape or the eloquence of tribal legends", They attracted so many bird species that Watson was entranced. Early one morning, a mother warthog appeared with three piglets, to drink. One of those piglets became Hoover, Watson's pet warthog, in a story that fills the final quarter of the book. When he was nine, Ouma took Watson to a native village many miles away to be initiated into the clan whose chief and she had been a great friends when they were young.

Conservation

Watson's introduction to conservation began at an early age. His grandfather Oupa wouldn't have cats or dogs on the family farm because they drove away the wildlife. The farm itself grew sisal, but like most South African farms, there were large areas away from the farmstead that were essentially wild. Most farmers gained income from these by shooting and hunting for horn and meat. Watson's grandparents did not. They left the land to the wildlife. Oupa spoke with great fondness of the huge herds of Eland that had passed the farm in his youth. 'It was like liquid life,' he remembered. Watson writes: "Now these elegant antelope can be found only in small groups, mostly in game reserves and national parks. But also on private farms, whose owners have begun to protect their wildlife and to set up a chain of thousands of natural sanctuaries in which Africa's birds and mammals, frogs and fish, can live safely and survive."

Contradiction

It has already been noted how a description of the arrival of Watson's storm damaged craft at an island in Indonesia in The Whole Hog''' differs from his vivid recollection of the same arrival in Gifts of Unknown Things. There is a similarly odd discrepancy between Lightning Bird and Warriors, Warthogs and Wisdom. In Lightning Bird published in 1982, Watson describes a typical white South African's interpretation of the activities of witch-doctors, negatively implying a certain element of cunning deception, but then in Warriors, Warthogs and Wisdom, published in 1997, he describes his black mentor Jabula performing exactly the same steps when called upon to find the killer of Oupa's favourite goat.

Accolades and criticism

Most criticism has been directed towards Supernature. Ten years after its publication, Watson confessed that he no longer thought of the book as his, it had become such public property. Beyond Supernature, published more than ten years later, takes a more sober look at the extraordinary in science and everyday life, albeit from a similar stance, embracing Watson's belief in animism, an endorsement of James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis and Watson's expanded version of Carl Gustav Jung's collective unconscious to include psychic interconnectedness within all of life, but with less confidence in spiritualism.

Bibliography Omnivore: The Role of Food in Human Evolution (1971)Supernature: A Natural History of the Supernatural (1973)The Romeo Error (1974) (Later reprinted as The Biology of Death)Gifts of Unknown Things: An Indonesian Adventure (1976)Lifetide: a Biology of the Unconscious (1979)Whales of the World: A Field Guide to the Cetaceans (1981)Lightning Bird: An African Adventure (1982)Heaven's Breath: A Natural History of the Wind (1984)Bali Entranced: A Celebration of Ritual (1985) – published in Japanese onlyEarthworks: Ideas on the Edge of Natural History (1986) (Later reprinted as Dreams of Dragons)Beyond Supernature: A New Natural History of the Supernatural (1986) (Later reprinted as Supernature 2)The Water Planet: A Celebration of the Wonder of Water (1988)Neophilia: The Tradition of the New (1989)Sumo: A Guide to Sumo Wrestling (1989)The Nature of Things: The Secret Life of Inanimate Objects (1990)Gifts of Unknown Things: A True Story of Nature, Healing and Initiation from Indonesia's Dancing Island (1992)Lasting Nostalgia: Essays Out of Africa (1992) – published in Japanese onlyTurtle Islands: Ritual in Indonesia (1995)Dark Nature: A Natural History of Evil (1995)Dreams of Dragons: An Exploration and Celebration of the Mysteries of Nature (1996)Monsoon: Essays on the Indian Ocean (1996) – published in Japanese onlyLost Cradle: A Collection of Dialogues (1997) – published in Japanese onlyWarriors, Warthogs, and Wisdom: Growing up in Africa (1997)Jacobson's Organ and the Remarkable Nature of Smell (2000)Elephantoms: Tracking the Elephant (2002)The Whole Hog: Exploring the Extraordinary Potential of Pigs'' (2004)