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Author Evening with Dan Werb

Our Wild Familiars

Discover surprising stories of adaptation, intelligence, and coexistence from cities around the world.

Featured on the Globe and Mail's Best New Books of Summer 2026, author and renowned Canadian epidemiologist, Dan Werb, explores the hidden lives of wild animals who've found ingenious ways to survive in urban communities in his book Our Wild Familiars.

In Our Wild Familiars, Dan explores the intertwined relationship between humans and the urban wildlife who live alongside us. The most obvious and resonant example is raccoons in downtown Toronto but he also looks at bats, coyotes, and even marine life and tigers. This is definitely not a dry, scientific tome. Dan is a wonderful storyteller who takes us in-depth to urban locations around the world to illuminate how the behaviour of wild animals affects our daily living and ours, theirs.

Some surprising examples include:

• We know that racoons in Toronto have the ability to open garbage containers. But incredibly, the knowledge of how to perform this feat spreads from one group of racoons to another so that when new bins are introduced, soon racoons across the city can do it. Yet, rural raccoons, who never interact with humans, do not seem to have the thinking skills to figure out how to open garbage bins.
• In a small city of Saudi Arabia, an on-going conflict between baboons, feral dogs, and people, spills over from a landfill site to the urban environment. But signs seem to indicate that the baboons are harnessing the behaviour of the dogs and perhaps, in a sense, even domesticating them.
• While human waste is negatively impacting wildlife everywhere, in Seattle the underwater architecture of discarded man-made objects like old cars, steel and concrete is providing a new and safe haven for the Giant Pacific Octopus to feed and breed. What seems like a destroyed environment is actually helping them thrive.
  
  

Stop by the Woolf & Company table to purchase titles by the author and have them signed as a memento of this special event.

Doors open at 6:00 pm.

Registration is required to confirm attendance. Please register for everyone attending. Limited entry without registration may be available at the door, but is not guaranteed.

Check out Dan Werb in our Connections 50+ Presents Cambridge Third Age Learning presentation earlier in the same day where he discusses his book, The Invisible Siege.

About the author

Dan Werb, PhD, is an award-winning writer and epidemiologist whose work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, The New York Times, Salon, Believer Magazine, and many other outlets in Canada and the US. He is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Toronto and Assistant Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health at the University of California San Diego. His latest book is Our Wild Familiars: How Animals Are Adapting to Cities and Reshaping the Natural World. He is also the author of two previous books, City of Omens and The Invisible Siege, which won the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction. Dan Werb lives in Toronto.

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COST: Free

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