CHAPTER FOUR

What Are You Willing to Fight For?

Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.—HOWARD THURMAN, American author, educator, and activist

The American burying beetle is nature’s most efficient recycler. A 1½-inch nocturnal carrion insect, it depends on small decaying animals such as birds and rodents as food sources and nests for its eggs. In under an hour, a pair of burying beetles can locate by scent a dead bird ten times their size, defeather and embalm it with sticky saliva, dig a burial hole for it, and lower it into the ground, using their legs as a conveyer belt. This becomes the home for their young to hatch and feed before emerging ...

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