sophia_sol | Entries tagged with book theme: birds

You may or may not remember the news story of the birder in central park who was confronted by a white woman and threatened with police because he was black, in May 2020. This book is that black birder's memoir.

Overall, a good book, and one I'm glad I read. Christian Cooper is much more than "just" a black man and a birder. He's gay, he's a nerd, he's an activist, he's pagan, he loves travelling, et cetera, et cetera. All of these things are a part of his life and shape who he is and how he reacted in that viral moment.

I really appreciated how he put that central park story near the end of the narrative, contextualising it in the rest of his life -- and then following it with a story about a similar confrontation in the same place just one year later contextualizes it even further. And also, that's not the end of his story. And I love how it ends! Tn the delight of always being able to see something new and learn something more about birds, no matter how long you've been a birder, and always being ready to throw yourself into the moment for it!

I do think the momentum in the book dragged a bit in the middle, plus I found it awkward how he made multiple references earlier in the book to the central park incident that made him famous; it makes the book feel too much of-the-moment, when a lot of what he's saying in this book is that that moment wasn't actually a bizarre outlier in his life as a whole.

But Cooper has led an interesting life, and I enjoyed hearing about it, and learnint about his time working for Marvel comics especially. He was part of the team working on Alpha Flight when the superhero Northstar came out as gay!

I listened to to this book as an audiobook, and Cooper narrates it himself. I like how his enthusiasm comes through in his reading, though whenever he tries put on a voice when doing dialogue for other people, it often comes out sounding loudly exasperated when he's aiming for high energy or high emotion, which is irritating.

One fun thing that the audiobook format allows is that at the beginning of each section of the book, there's an audio clip of birdsong, for a bird species that will be featured in that section of text! I really enjoyed trying to ID the bird from the song and then listening for when it would come up in one of his stories.

Overall, though it's not a perfect book, I am glad I read it and I think it's worth reading.

A charming little non-fiction book about pigeons, written and illustrated by the person behind the fabulous Bird & Moon comics. The writing is a bit on the simplistic side, but that's understandable since it's written to a pretty broad audience, and the art is super charming, plus it definitely succeeded at making me want to pay more attention to pigeons! Unfortunately my city is actually remarkably low on pigeons to look at :( Genuinely cannot remember the last time I saw a pigeon from close enough to see any details on it.

This is a nonfiction biography of a woman who was an amateur scientist in pretty much the end of the era when you could have a successful career publishing academic articles without formal credentials, and only the beginning of the era when women could have a successful career in academia. She was born to Swedish nobility, her first husband died in the Russian revolution, she was a nurse to the famous Dionne Quintuplets, and she spent decades living in a tiny cabin in the woods in northern ontario taking intensive observations of birds.

A fascinating woman! But obviously I read this book because BIRDS. And it does mostly focus on her life after she falls headfirst into what became her true life's work of studying and understanding birds. I loved reading about her passion, her efforts, her extensive correspondence with bird experts across north america, her growing and deep familiarity with all the birds of her area, her dedication to keeping careful records of everything she saw and heard. Some of the things she studied continue to be relevant to ornithologists today!

But one through-line in the book was Louise's knowledge of the declining numbers of songbirds over the years, even from the very earliest days of her birding efforts in the 1930's. She knew, too, that the declining numbers were due to human activity, and she mourned their loss. Near the end of the book, the reader is provided with some numbers of just how great the decline in songbirds has been from when Louise began her records to now in the 2020's and it is honestly heartbreaking. Even just within Louise's life, she talks about the obvious and stark change in the experience of the morning bird chorus. It brings me near tears to think of how things used to be! Between habitat loss in both breeding grounds and wintering grounds, the effects of herbicides and insecticides, disappearing food due to the collapsing insect population, and more, songbird presence is a shadow of what it once was.

The other important thing I learned from the book is that the things I want to know about birds ARE out there, I just need to acquire bird books that are focused on specific species or specific families, instead of field guides, if I want to know everything about a bird's life and behaviour. NOTED. My bird library WILL be growing.

A graphic novel telling a story in a series of character vignettes about the points of tension and points of connection in a small Mennonite community in southern Manitoba.

It's....hmm. It does a great job of giving an accurate and nuanced portrayal of the current state of the Mennonite community and the conversations of the current time in Canada (including: relationships with indigenous people and the history of residential schools; queer people's degree of welcome in churches; relationships with war and the military; dynamics between modern megachurches and more traditional churches; voluntourism; and more). I 100% believed in the realness of every single character in this book. And it left me unsettled at the end, but in a good way? idk the whole thing is somehow both melancholy and hopeful.

I do wish though that the book was saying something more though than just holding up a mirror to go "this is who we are." I mean there's value in that! But it wasn't quite enough for me. But maybe that's just, like, where we're at with fiction that actually explores Mennonite identity: there's so little Mennonite fiction out there that we can't get beyond just going for representation through depiction.

I also struggled in places to follow the story — although the art is great, it is not quite distinctive enough in how it depicts all the many different characters, and I had a huge amount of trouble following who was who as they interwove throughout each other's stories. And checking the character cheat sheet at the front didn't always help as much as I wanted it to.

I did love that the book is clearly by someone who at the very least knows birders, and might be a bird enjoyer himself. (but it doesn't go overboard on the bird content, just makes choices of what birds to include that aren't birds the average non-birder would have thought much about!)

Overall.... I'm glad I read it. I'm curious how it would read to someone who isn't intimately familiar with the things it's depicting, though!

I've been having a grand time reading this book a few pages a day for months, and I finally reached the end! It calls itself an "advanced" birding book, which at first intimidated me because I thought it meant I had to be advanced to understand what it was saying, but no, it's a book that is designed to take any birder and teach them the skills needed to become more advanced.

I loved the underlying mindset of the book, that the best way to be a birder is to bird in the way that makes you happy, and a good birder is a birder who finds joy in the experience, however they approach it. And this book is merely meant to be a resource for the kind of birder who's into getting really careful and detailed about bird ID, but that doesn't mean it's the only way to bird, and this approach isn't for everyone.

But this approach IS for MEEEEE.

The book starts with an extensive section teaching you things that are relevant to ID for any type of bird: about the structure of feathers in wing, tail, and body; about molting and other changes to feather appearance over time; about behaviour; about songs and calls; and so forth. Then it goes on to illustrate its principles by discussing specific groups of birds for whom ID can be challenging, and what you can do to help you better understand what you're seeing in these contexts.

The example birds are all North American, so it's a book that may be best for a North American birder, but the first section is relevant for birders no matter where they live and what birds they're looking at.

I found it very engagingly written, not dry at all, and I have learned SO much from it. I have started looking at birds in a whole new way since getting into this book, and it's added so much to my birding experience!

I also appreciate that it's very practical, discussing what you're likely to experience in real world contexts, and what to do about it. So for example in the chapter on seabirds, it's like, you're almost certainly going to only ever see these birds in the context of a chartered birding experience on a boat, with an expert on board to point things out, so here's some good ways to help you to make the most of that context.

I will admit I did a bit of skimming in the chapter on Empidonax flycatchers. The author makes it clear in a number of places throughout the book that sometimes the correct ID answer to a bird you see is "there isn't enough information available to me to make a certain ID" and that is particularly emphasised in the Empids. For a number of Empids you can only really be certain about your ID if you hear the voice, because they look so similar and the amount of visible variation within a species can overlap so much with the variation between species. So reading through careful descriptions of what kinds of barely noticeable field marks MIGHT be a mildly useful sign in pointing towards one Empid over another just....didn't feel worthwhile to me personally to spend that many pages on, at least at this stage of my birding skills. It's possible I'll feel differently once I have a lot more experience in looking at birds and recognizing extremely subtle variation, and then I can come back to Empids and feel like it's an exciting challenge instead of a "wow no thank you."

But other than the Empids I read through every page with fascination, even for birds that live in parts of North America that are nowhere near me, because it was still teaching me more about how to look at birds, even if that particular bird isn't relevant to me.

And I will definitely be regularly referring to this book in the future for help with some of these difficult-to-ID groups!

I first heard about this book a few years ago, before I first became interested in birding, but was intrigued by it because of the history and context. Birding in a Western context originated with the approach of going out into the field to shoot birds, and then taking the dead birds home with you to analyse in detail for identification. But in the late 19th century there was a movement to change this, because enthusiasts all going out to kill birds is not actually good for the well-being of birds. And this book was written with that agenda in mind: to convince readers that it is worthwhile to examine live birds in the field, and then leave them be.

When I tried reading it at the time I first heard of it, though, I very quickly became bored of it and gave up. But recently it occurred to me that the book might read better to someone who has an intrinsic love of birds properly installed, and gave it another try - and it was so worth it!

It's fascinating to compare this book to modern field guides. Its approach is so different! Of course, due to the type of printing available at the time, detailed full-colour images of every bird can't reasonably be included, so there are just a few black and white drawings here and there. But also the information provided in the text itself is so different! This is where your can really see its agenda. It earnestly takes its time to tell you personalized individual little stories about times the author has encountered these birds, and what an interesting and charming experience it was. It also spends a lot of time describing the birds' personalities, in very human-like ways! But of course it does. It wants to convince the reader that the birds are worth keeping alive.

The other information it provides is more haphazard. It nearly always takes the time to discuss habitats, nesting habits, and something of appearance, but the level of detail is wildly variable, and it's rarely sufficient that I would feel confident in identifying a bird based on the description. Sometimes the author attempts to convey what the bird's songs and calls sound like, but it's hopeless to give meaningful information on this through the medium of text, though it's clear when the author thinks it's particularly important for a bird that you know what it sounds like, and is really earnestly trying to help you out. Too bad the Merlin app didn't exist in 1889!

And it makes some very odd choices about how to organise its information. For example: its discussion of the different orders and families to which birds belong is.....in the section on chipping sparrows, more than 60 pages into the book. Then the classifications are mentioned on and off, inconsistently, until they're summarized as a whole in the section on thrushes at page 195. What the heck! It makes it clear that the expected use of the book is to read it front to back, rather than just to pick it up as a reference to figure out a particular bird you're seeing. Though the back does have some....mildly useful appendices for looking up birds by specific characteristic.

But the nesting habits and behaviour descriptions are actually nice to have (even if they're couched in flowery victorian nature-writing language) because modern field guides don't seem to tend to include that information, just details on appearance and a brief suggestion of habitat, with only occasional additional info. Modern field guides want to fit as many birds as possible into as pocket-sized a book as possible, and so they keep their text very short, and I do think this is too bad!

I also loved getting the insights into some of the old or more regional names for some of the birds, instead of just the official name you get in modern field guides! "Bee martin" for kingbird! "Chippy" for chipping sparrow! "Crow blackbird" for grackle! "Yellow hammer" and a whole collection of other options for the northern flicker! (in fact I had to go look this one up in Merlin using the description given for the yellow hammer to determine for sure which bird was being referred to, because "northern flicker" isn't among any of the names given for the bird in this book!)

It also has fun little bits of sass (for example, when it talks about the chipping sparrow's song, it says the bird has a "cheerful perseverance that would grace a better cause," lol) but sometimes in its efforts to personify the birds it's pretty mean. The author clearly doesn't think highly of flycatchers for example, and I felt very indignant. "All the disagreeable qualities of the flycatchers seem to centre in this bird," it says about the kingbird, and I'm just like HOW RUDE. HOW DARE YOU. YOU'RE SO WRONG.

At any rate I'm very glad that this book was written at the time it was for the purpose it was, and it was an enjoyable look into a different era of birding, despite its foibles!