These essays are not just field reports. They expand with reflections on love, family, life, and death and engage a range of emotions from wonder to humor. And because birds magnify our relationship to the natural world, you will read stories about habitat loss, declining species, birds that collide with buildings, or birds now extinct. Some too tell of small victories...It's a perfect read for a winter night when the wind is blowing and you are feeling out of sorts; it's an anthology to keep near when the birds are not. ~ Susan Fox Rogers, Editor
When Birds are Near is a collection of twenty-six essays, all focussed on birds, all written by serious birders. If they have anything in common it might be a feeling of avidity: whether the writers are commenting on the species visiting their backyard feeders or describing the lengths they have gone to in order to track down some rare sighting for their "life list", these are no casual observers; these are people with immense mental catalogues of field marks and birdsong, accumulated through years of study and experience in the field, and who are so in tune with the variety of birdlife surrounding them, that they have a heightened sense of their own place in nature. Not surprisingly, this enhanced communion with wildness makes for many essays lamenting humanity's deleterious effects on the natural world, but this collection is not a downer – there are many beautiful moments of awe, hope, and humour. The collection is a little uneven – I liked some essays much more than others – but there is much more good than otherwise and earns a solid four stars overall. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted might not be in their final forms.)
Nearly every essay had something quotable in it, so I'm just going to use this space to record a few highlights. To start with the timely: J. Drew Lanham (a university professor, poet and author) writes about his passion for birding in Red-headed Love Child. As a black man, he mentions the casual racism he can encounter while out in nature, and while chasing down Sandhill Cranes and rising early to watch the mating dance of Greater Prairie Chickens, he muses on the very different experience the Nebraska prairies must have offered to those men remembered to history as Buffalo Soldiers:
More than 100 years ago, black men of the U.S. Army's Ninth and Tenth Calvary and Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth Infantry followed orders and endured the extremes of heat, cold, dust, mud, insects, and disease that often plague the out-of-the-way places I go by choice to find birds. In between the daily tasks of surviving rampant racism from the U.S. Army, skirmishes with American Indians fighting (rightfully) to hold onto homelands, and incursions from Mexican patriots (trying to understandably reclaim lost homeland), I'm sure there wasn't much time for the leisure of watching birds or rising at dawn to witness a prairie ritual. But then again, this Nebraska trip was breaking brain barriers I'd long held as dogma. Maybe I was giving these brave men short shrift. I'd like to think that all of us, regardless of circumstance, find some way to appreciate the wonders of the world around us.By way of contrast, Richard Bohannon (cartographer and college lecturer) writes in Little Brown Birds about being confronted by soldiers while entering a nature preserve adjacent to the site of a missile silo in North Dakota:
It's worth saying here that I'm a middle-aged white man driving a relatively new car, and all of the military personnel appeared to be white men, young enough to be my students. If any racial profiling was going on, it was to my benefit.Jonathan Franzen (author of note and ardent bird-watcher) writes presciently in the humorous and thoughtful My Bird Problem:
When I went inside, no kids came running to meet me, and this absence of kids seemed to clinch it: I was better off spending my anxiety budget on viral pandemics and dirty bombs than on global warming. Even if I had had kids, it would have been hard work for me to care about the climatic well-being of their children's children. Not having kids freed me altogether. Not having kids was my last, best line of defense against the likes of Al Gore.(Be assured that whether or not Franzen spent some of his anxiety budget on viral pandemic preparedness, this essay goes on to describe his transformation into an environmentalist for the sake of birdlife.) And just because I liked the writing throughout this one, I'll include this bit from Alison Townsend's (award-winning poet and author) Wild Swans:
Life is always harder than we think it should be. But it is ours, isn't it? And here were these magnificent birds, sailing along on our lake, going about their business and filling me with an awe that knocked me sideways and took me outside my small human concerns. Bound by cycles of seasonal change and patterns of birth, and renewal, the sight of the swans comforted me on some essential level, offering what I can only describe as the solace of wild things. If they could manage to do something this enormous, guided by star patterns and earth's magnetic fields, I could navigate my life, couldn't I?I particularly liked the hopeful essays that point to some of the successes of human intervention (Christina Baal's In the Eyes of the Condor [I especially loved her helpless awe in the presence of these “thunderbirds”]; Jenn Dean's The Keepers of the Ghost Bird [about Bermuda's success in bringing the cahow back from the brink]; and several writers' encounters with Sandhill Cranes [and for that matter, Franzen espying Whooping Cranes as the 400th bird species on his life list]), but there's no closing our eyes to the fact that between habitat encroachment and climate change, humanity is driving countless bird species to the edge of extinction – and how much poorer will our lives be when the birds are no longer near? Much to love in this collection that brings that question to the fore.
Just a few more notes: The writers of these essays were routinely quoting from other authors; often quoting something more exquisitely interesting than they had to say themselves. A few examples -
If we have ever regarded our interest in natural history as an escape from the realities of our modern world, let us now reverse that attitude. For the mysteries of living things...are among the great realities. ~ Rachel Carson (in her acceptance speech for the John Burroughs Medal)
The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. ~ Iris Murdoch (describing "a day when she was feeling anxious and resentful until she became entranced by a hovering kestrel")
If you don't love things in particular, you cannot love the world, because the world doesn't exist except in individual things. ~ Thomas Moore (in Care of the Soul)And to return to Christina Baal (artist and environmental educator) and her essay on the California Condor:
To anyone who has ever seen Disney's The Lion King, vultures are birds that fly around sinisterly waiting for Simba to die in the wilderness so they can eat him. But to birders like myself, vultures are these incredible creatures that clean up after us humans and keep the world free from a myriad of diseases. Although my family thinks I'm crazy, I insist that these bareheaded birds that pee on themselves to keep cool and vomit as a means of self-defense are the most beautiful birds in the world.Just the day before I read this, the girls and I were sitting on lounge chairs by the pool as their Dad floated on his blow-up toy; head back, arms and legs spread wide to maximise his sun exposure. It caught my notice that there was one, then two, then three big raptors crossing the sky high above us, and my first thought was for the safety of Cormac and Peaches; a hawk or falcon couldn't pick up even these little dogs, but some kind of eagle might - and why did those three birds just circle back towards us?
I pointed out the birds to the girls and Dave, and as we all looked up, one of the birds dipped lower, and with its wide, brown wings and wrinkled, scarlet head, it was immediately apparent that these were turkey vultures. Ugly. Disgusting. As hunched and ominous as a trio of grim reapers.
The lead bird drifted down even a little lower, saw what he needed to see, and then floated a thermal easily back up and out of view. And that was the whole encounter. And I had to wonder what drew them near - if they were narrowing in on the scent of some dead animal in the park behind us, I wasn't aware of the vultures later returning to feast there. Could they have possibly seen Dave spread out on his floaty, spying him from some unknowable height, and circled down to check his pulse?
We'll never know - but unlike Baal, I did not find the sight of them majestic or beautiful (but having not lived her experience in the presence of actual California Condors, I will grant her her estimation of their majesty). For my experience: I want to record that sitting under three circling turkey vultures made me feel vulnerable and incredibly mortal; it's all too easy to imagine those pointy beaks daintily tearing flesh from bone - my flesh from my bone - and I'm not yet ready for the cleaning crew.
