"Flyaway"

I haven't read it myself as yet, but "Flyaway" is a highly-rated 2009 volume about the life and times and experiences of a wild bird rehabililtator, Suzie Gilbert. Newly-out in paperback.

a Web review of it here:

http://10000birds.com/review-of-flyaway-by-suzie-gilbert.htm

and some more on Suzie Gilbert here:

http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/stories/flyaway

Avian Evolution Questioned

Birds evolving from dinosaurs... not so fast. The birds-from-dinosaurs notion continues to be debated, even while accepted by a wide majority of scientists, and despite the "vagaries of the fossil record":


http://www.physorg.com/news184959295.html

The Mystery of Bird Migration Continues

Now an olfactory component postulated to account for bird migration:


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100127110423.htm

Candid Camera Reveals More Tool Use in Crows

 Using motion sensitive cameras in the wild British researchers document tool use by crows as previously demonstrated in the laboratory and elsewhere:

http://tinyurl.com/y99uc2f

One of the World's Critical Questions...

"Why do pigeons walk with bobbing heads?" :

http://tinyurl.com/yel9uut

Owl Pellets

And now for something totally different --- an owl pellet dissected:

http://www.blogsmonroe.com/nature/2009/12/please-open-before-christmas/

California Condor

 Friday video... the California Condor Comeback:

The Intelligence of Crows

Friday video: a popular TED talk on the high intelligence of crows, and how we can use it:

"A Year On the Wing" Enthralls

 Dee-licious, Dee-lightful!



"A Year on the Wing: Four Seasons in a Life With Birds" by Tim Dee



I'll cut to the chase: this is the most beautiful piece of nature-writing I have ever read. Period. There are other contenders, other great reads, but this taut, marvelous volume blew me away like no other.

I'd already been browsing this offering in a local bookstore for a couple of weeks when, serendipitously, the publisher sent along a copy for review. Brit Tim Dee is a BBC radio producer and writer, but "A Year On the Wing: Four Seasons In a Life With Birds" is his book-writing debut... And WHAT a debut!: This book sings... and soars... and sizzles, with prose that doesn't seem so much written, as poured onto each page from a wonderful carafe, like fine wine. Promotional material for the book uses words like "mesmerizing," "mystical," "moving," "gorgeous," "thrilling," "luminous," "poignant, "compelling," "poetic"... and all are apt for the rich text.  I'd additionally call this book intensely 'biophilic' --- a sendoff on E.O. Wilson's famously-coined term "biophilia," referring to the innate human need for connection with nature.

Generally, I like science books to bowl me over with empiricism, interesting facts, logic, reasoning, thought-provoking ideas. But nature books are a different ballgame... here I like to be swept away in lyricism, feeling, sentiment, connection, imagery. And Dee's book delivers in spades; a tour de force of nature-writing, reminiscent of early Annie Dillard.

Despite Dee's references being to British birds and locales, any American birder will easily follow and be swept up in the images and feelings evoked here.
The second chapter of the book narrates at length on the Woodcock, a fascinating bird familiar to both Americans and Brits. Here's a paragraph to give you the flavor of Dee's prose (if not the flavor of a Woodcock itself!!):

"Eating a woodcock, as I did once, is like eating earth. No wine has ever released its terroir to me as that bird did. It tasted like a prune, sweet and sour at once, a mixture of loam and chalk. The bird's dark purple flesh crumbled on my plate like a dried worm cast and the worms that made its meat. I had held the bird in my hand before it was plucked and cooked among the white surfaces and steel utensils of a smart London kitchen. Its cryptic moth-wing colors gave it the look of a worn fireside rug. To hold its book of browns, the wings falling open on either side of its body, was to sense the humus of dead leaves mulched into a bird over thousands of years --- the woodcock as a surviving fragment of an old earth, from a time when leaves became birds, branches grew wings, and the dark moved."

And this is the norm... There isn't a mundane page, a weak paragraph, a dull sentence in this amazing volume, as the author dances from woodcocks, to classic bird books, to swirling starlings, ravens, poetry, migration, nightjars, and other topics unforeseen, like literature, childhood escapades, and a suicide. I've always loved warblers, but I attained a new appreciation for Redstarts, in particular (another bird shared by America and Britain), from Dee's treatment of them here. And nightjars will never be the same for me again either. But every bird Dee touches turns magical and memorable. And there are dozens of species that take flight in these pages, some but briefly, some more front-and-center.

Each of the book's twelve chapters address a different month of the year and Tim's birding activities therein, but he really weaves his entire life into the narrative, sometimes hauntingly or sadly, or contemplatively or joyously. August is focused around bird banding, September on migration. The "October" chapter interestingly recounts Dee's own dual background in birding and nature-writing, telling which writers impacted him most growing up. His mini-discussions of literature, writers, and natural history are as interesting as his verbal portraiture of nature and birds.

I wanted this book to go on and on (it is only 200 pages), and was expecting some sort of profound crescendo as it did approach the end. Instead, it seemed to me to end in mid-air, a tad abruptly (the last chapters just as good as the prior chapters, but with no climactic finale), but maybe I missed something along the way. I'll be reading it again to see if the ending brings more closure, or if it simply makes you want to start over and read it again... and again.

I have to believe this volume is in line to win several awards for 2009 books, in nature writing and possibly other categories as well. And I hesitate to even look forward to Dee's next book --- I mean how could he equal, let alone top this?!! The volume is a bit reminiscent of Jonathan Rosen's wonderful work and ode to birds, "The Life of the Skies" which I previously rated a high "A-" --- what's left for me to give Dee's volume, except an A++ (...and no, I've never given that before).

Having heaped on all this praise though I must add that the potency of Dee's prose may be lost on those who lack great experience with the subjects he is addressing: nature and birds. Anyone with no interest in these topics just won't feel the power of Dee's vividness, passion, imagery. So this is not necessarily a book for everyone, or for non-nature readers, nor even beginning ones; it is for those already somewhat seasoned, even immersed... and ready, or primed, to be carried away.
But hey, I'll quit beating around the bush... I liked this book... A WHOLE... DANG... LOT!!!

Archaeopteryx Revisited

Study challenges long-held notion that Archaeopteryx was a prototypical bird:

http://tinyurl.com/yhp327p

Despite widespread consensus the technical debates over bird evolution go on and on.

"Essential Wisdom" of Crows

It's amazing how many volumes for public consumption have come out in recent years about crows or the avian corvid family they represent; a tribute to both the ubiquity, and the inherent fascination, of these brainy birds.

Now another new meditation and natural history on crows has arrived, "Crow Planet" by Lyanda Lynn Haupt. See HERE and HERE.

Haven't had a chance to read it myself yet, but looks promising.

Brief NY Times review here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/books/review/Schillinger-t.html

Bird Evolution

The popular, common view that everyone hears is that birds evolved from dinosaurs; yes, those are miniature-seed-eating-feathered-brontosauruses at your backyard feeder... but NOT so fast. Another minority view that has actually been around a long time, but had difficulty gaining traction is that birds have little to do with dinosaurs, evolving instead from earlier small tree-dwelling creatures; they evolved from the trees down, not from the ground up, so-to-speak.
"Tetrapod Zoology" blog recently covered some of the arguments HERE.
And more HERE, from ScienceDaily.

The Intelligence of Crows

Penguin Poo

And now from the scatological sciences....

Scientists are tracking penguin poop (guano, droppings... birdSH*T) from space, via satellite imaging, in order to tally colonies of Emperor Penguins in Antarctica:

http://www.scientificblogging.com/news_articles/penguins_space_guano_story

Birds Just Gotta Dance

Good blog post from Ed Yong on dancing birds HERE, as made famous on the internet by "Snowball" the dancing cockatoo (lots of examples on YouTube). If you love birds, dancing, or animal behavior (or know someone who does), this post is must-reading.

Cranes, Revered and Roasted...

A wonderful podcast below from Julie Zickefoose on "Life and Death Among the Cranes" --- what happens when an inveterate birdwatcher and nature-lover comes face-to-face with the fact that one of the largest, most primal birds in North America is routinely hunted along its migratory flyways:

http://www.birdwatchersdigest.net/podcasts/thisbirdinglife/episode19.mp3

"Life List"

I've got a backlog of books to read at the moment, but one I'll have to add to the queue is Olivia Gentile's new (and first) volume "Life List" (here and here) which chronicles the life of Phoebe Snetsinger, a name not widely known outside of birdwatching circles. Snetsinger took up birding at the age of 49 after being diagnosed with cancer and given one year to live. Instead she obsessively traveled the world for 20 years and every continent viewing 8000+ (a world record) of the 10,000+ bird species in existence (before dying tragically in a van accident on a remote bird expedition). This is a book that will inspire and uplift. A story of fortitude, self-determination, and the human spirit unleashed, that any reader, and particularly birders will find enthralling.

Birds In Serious Decline

ONE THIRD of all U.S. bird species are currently "endangered, threatened, or in serious decline" according to this New York Times article on the just-issued "U.S. State of the Birds" report.

"THE LIFE OF THE SKIES"

An Homage To Birds....


I've long enjoyed Jonathan Rosen's essays in various places, and am a bird-lover, so it was with great anticipation that I looked forward to his work "The Life of the Skies" when I first heard it was due to be published. Thankfully, he didn't disappoint. This book won't meet everyone's desire, but for my taste it is the best, and most unconventional, bird-related volume out in awhile, with its rich overview of the pastime of birding; not strictly the science, nor sport, nor even art or history of birding (there are other books that do that), but the sheer spirit and joy of birding!

Early on in the volume, Rosen notes that birds are almost the ONLY wild animals most people encounter anymore on a regular basis throughout their lives; we have so exterminated, or removed from our environs, all the others; and unfortunately birds themselves are declining rapidly as well. Birds are in a sense our single remaining thread to a world long gone. It is a sad thought, and the lingering thought that cloaks the entire remainder of the book with poignancy.

The book is liberally sprinkled with interesting historical facts, stories, lyrical writing, and unpredictable jumps from subject to subject (if you're looking for a straightforward, scientific history of American birding, this book isn't for you). A wide range of figures appear with wonderful narrative as well (Audubon, Thoreau, Whitman, Burroughs, Theodore Roosevelt, Alfred Russel Wallace, Robert Frost, E.O. Wilson, among others); even Jewish mysticism arises recurringly out of the wonderful prose.

One of the most heated debates in birding the last few years has been over the possible existence (or extinction) of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, one of the grandest birds ever to inhabit North American forests of the south. Rosen looked (unsuccessfully) for the bird in Louisiana following a credible claim for its appearance back in 1999, and the book starts off by name-dropping this "ghost bird," which then returns time and time again throughout the volume, almost as a mascot for the gloom... and hope... of which the volume so often hints.

The chapters of this book are so varied and sometimes disjointed that they can almost be read non-sequentially. So too, different readers will vary widely in which chapters they most enjoy. Chapter 10 is especially entertaining, tackling the age-old question of whether one can be a birder and still be manly (my phrasing, not Rosen's, and I won't give his answer here). His chapters on birding in Israel are also oddly entertaining and especially so his treatment of the middle eastern 'bird of paradox,' the Hoopoe. But everyone will have their own favorite chapters; it's difficult to choose.

There are pages or passages, as in any 300-page volume, that don't seem to carry their weight as well, but I admire Rosen for even daring to put forth such eclectic, wide-ranging flights of fancy (there is history, poetry, science, theology, meditation, humor, stream-of-consciousness, and oh yeah, birds, here). I would have enjoyed reading more about modern birding, about Roger Tory Peterson and even Pete Dunne, and many of the current activities of birding, but that just doesn't appear to be Rosen's intention here.

Publishers Weekly once wrote of Annie Dillard's "Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, "This book of wonder is one of the truly beautiful books of this or any season... which, on any page, offers a passage one can scarcely wait to share with a friend. It is a triumph." I would say pretty much the same for Rosen's offering.
If you're a bird or nature lover I heartily recommend this book. But maybe more importantly, IF you're NOT a bird or nature lover (but enjoy good writing)... read THIS book... and, become one.

A-
*********************