Book of the week

Strange Harvests by Edward Posnett (Bodley Head, $35)

Strange Harvests is a book full of fascinating s .... It tells how, for example, in the middle of the 19th century, there was a fortune to be made selling bird excrement, and how, at the start of the 21st, some of us were persuaded that coffee was at its best when made with beans from the scat of a tree-climbing mammal.

Bird guano (once widely used as a fertiliser) and civet coffee are two of seven naturally occurring wonders collected by humans that

Edward Posnett follows from harvest to market. The others are eiderdown; the edible bird’s nest; sea silk, the anchoring ‘‘beard’’ of a giant mussel; vicuna fibre, shorn in the wild from a South American relative of the llama; and tagua, the ivory-like seed of a palm tree, which has been turned into buttons, toys and carvings.

The book had its beginning in a prize-winning essay in which Posnett explored the relationship between Icelanders and the eider duck. For centuries, people in the remote Westfjords region of Iceland have offered shelter to nesting eiders, protected them from predators and, once the chicks

have hatched, collected their reward: the down the mother bird draws from her breast to make the nest. In medieval times that down was accepted as payment by tax collectors; today it fills jackets that cost up to £6200 apiece.

The relationship between Icelanders and eiders seemed to offer a rare example of equality rather than exploitation. That prompted Posnett to look into small-scale harvests that held out the promise of a similar balance.

In Sarawak, Malaysia, Posnett watches as a lean, muscled climber negotiates a network of bamboo poles and wooden ladders built high inside a limestone cave (‘‘the work of a carpenter unhinged’’) to scrape off the nests that black-nest swiftlets have made with saliva

and feathers. For this man, caves are sacred places, named after the spirits that led him there.

In Java, Indonesia, Posnett is shown a bird house specially built to draw the white-nest swiftlet, complete with speakers playing birdsong, an enterprise its builder describes as ‘‘a small bank’’. Wherever the author goes, whatever tradition and trade he explores, there’s a constant: the harvesters receive only a tiny cut of the final price of their produce.

In Indonesia, he finds that, while one coffee dealer goes out of his way to collect civet scat without disturbing its producer, others are less scrupulous. They farm civets, cut their claws to stop them climbing and keep them in cages.

In Sardinia, he meets a woman who styles herself the ‘‘maestro’’ of byssus, or sea silk. She gives away what she weaves, saying that sea silk ‘‘cannot be bought or sold and does not submit to the laws of the market’’, but she is monopolistic in her own way: she insists that her account of its history be the only one heard.

Strange Harvests is a rich and absorbing exploration of places where a singular culture meets global capitalism. And a reminder, too, that where there’s muck there’s brass. – Michael Kerr, The Daily Telegraph

Bird guano and civet coffee are two naturally occurring wonders collected by humans that Edward Posnett follows from harvest to market.