(Reviews)

All Aflutter

Since the 18th century, people from all walks of life have been possessed by birding. The thrill reflects, as a notable poet once wrote, an assurance that “the globe's still working.”

By Thomas Urquhart

A Bird in the Bush: A Social History of Birdwatching
By Stephen Moss
Aurum Press, 375 pages, $31.95

Did you know that the first real birdwatcher was an 18th-century clergyman living in a quiet English village? Until then, writes Stephen Moss, birds were more likely to be “objects of religious worship or superstition, used for ornament or decoration, or simply represent a good square meal.” The Reverend. Gilbert White, however, observed birds for pleasure and curiosity. In 1789 he published The Natural History of Selborne, 20 years' worth of meticulous notes, which is to birdwatching what Darwin's Origin of Species is to evolutionary biology. It remains, according to Moss, “one of the best-selling books of all time.”

White's solitary forays may seem a far cry from jet-setting world listers, but in A Bird in the Bush: A Social History of Birdwatching, Moss, a writer and BBC television producer, connects the historical dots from gentlemanly inquiry to collecting mania to 21st-century accessory-laden sport. A troop of ornithologists, some better known than others, illustrate the impact of ever improving guns, optics, and printing, along with changing social attitudes. Poets weigh in, too; take, for example, Ted Hughes's laconic appreciation of swifts in spring: “They've made it again / Which means the globe's still working. . . .”

Moss begins with profiles of the founding birdwatchers—besides White, there's the poet John Clare, the engraver Thomas Bewick, and George Montagu, about whom, it turns out, there is more to know than that he gave his name to the eponymous harrier—set against an exploration of social change in England at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. This quartet, Moss writes, “found a connection between human beings and nature at the very moment when a dislocation between man and the natural world was beginning to occur.”

The book's most fascinating chapter deals with World War I. There are poignant accounts of birds from the trenches: On a rest, after being “cut to pieces” in action, an officer writes of his delight at sighting a golden oriole's nest in a wood: “I had just spent a first morning watching the gorgeous cock, when the colonel announced that we had to return at once to the line.” In Whitehall, London—the hub of British government—Foreign Secretary Edward Grey discovered in birds and nature “a great sanctuary into which we could go and find refuge for a time from even the greatest trouble of the world, finding there not enervating ease, but something which gave optimism, confidence and security.”

Soldiers in World War II likewise took comfort in birds, such as a nightingale on the Italian front: “As if showing us and the Germans that there were better things to do, it opened up until the whole valley rang with song. . . . I sensed a tremendous affirmation that ‘this would go on.' ” Or a skylark: “In the lulls between explosions I could hear a lark singing. That made the war seem sillier than ever.” A prisoner of war in Bavaria found in his situation the perfect opportunity to study the (European) redstart. “It seemed to me that we prisoners might watch some bird together, and that several of us working on one kind might discover more than if we tried to make our notes on all the birds that should visit us.” In one three-month period, these POW ornithologists logged 850 hours watching a single pair.

A Bird in the Bush mines British birding lore with laserlike focus. Depending upon your capacity for arcane information, you will find it either fantastic fun or, after a while, a bit maddening. Also, by ruthlessly limiting himself to birds, Moss ignores their unique importance in an overall approach to nature.

More serious is his virtual exclusion of contemporary bird protection. The conservation efforts of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds get short shrift; the wholesale hunting of migratory waterfowl, which gave rise to BirdLife International and international conservation, gets not a word. Not until the third-to-last page does Moss mention that the Red Data Book, the official list of the world's threatened species, is now up to 1,213 birds. “The fundamental paradox facing birding today,” he notes, “[is] that as we get to know more about the world's birds, and have better opportunities to watch and study them, so we contribute to their decline.”

Not long ago National Public Radio interviewed an American soldier in Iraq who was watching the fall migration then under way. Echoing the voices from earlier wars, he found comfort in this proof that “the globe's still working.” Moss makes clear that birdwatchers the world over are fueled by the same sentiment, but he could have been more definitive in using it to forge a commitment to conservation.

Thomas Urquhart is a writer and the former executive director of the Maine Audubon Society. To order A Bird in the Bush, go to www.amazon.co.uk.

EDITORS' CHOICE

Tracking Desire: A Journey After Swallow-tailed Kites
By Susan Cerulean
University of Georgia Press, 192 pages, $24.95

Tracking Desire: A Journey After Swallow-tailed Kites is an honest book, finely written, exposing the author's heart even more intensely than the bird's natural history. Many people consider the swallow-tailed kite to be North America's most exquisite, most graceful raptor (“living origami,” one observer in the book calls them). Susan Cerulean reached out to the birds in their diminished, degraded range after coming to Florida as a biology student three decades ago. Although at first she took part in banding expeditions, she eventually shied away from the hands-on study of these angellike creatures. Her narrative—from the obsessive pursuit of kites to a cry against human destruction of other forms of life—is a deeply personal journey. It is also the author's attempt to “dive for spirit, the invisible river of being that connects us all at one time, all the time.”

—Frank Graham Jr.

The Philosopher Fish: Sturgeon, Caviar and the Geography of Desire
By Richard Adams Carey
Counter Point Press, 336 pages, $26

The sturgeon is one of the world's oldest and largest fishes, dating back at least 100 million years and occasionally reaching weights in the thousands of pounds. “It's possible that some of our famous lake monsters—Nessie in Loch Ness, Champ in Lake Champlain, and so forth—are (or were) really sturgeons,” writes Richard Adams Carey in The Philosopher Fish: Sturgeon, Caviar and the Geography of Desire. In search of the fish's historical and contemporary importance, the author uncovers a fascinating cast of characters—from caviar dealers and fishermen to law-enforcement agents and scientists—whose lives revolve around the sturgeon and its shrinking population. Carey, the author of the widely acclaimed Against the Tide, visits the Caspian Sea, where pollution, dams, and, most of all, poaching are endangering the survival of the three sturgeon species most known for their famous eggs: the beluga, osetra, and sevruga. In the United States, whose sturgeon species were fished to near extinction at the turn of the 20th century, a staggering 70 percent of the caviar sold is obtained through the black market, either through poaching in the Caspian or through product mislabeling. Even when poachers are caught, the punishment is usually a slap on the wrist. Carey offers no definitive solutions, but his informative and fast-paced book does explore the possibility of using hatchery fish to augment native populations, while limiting the international caviar trade.

—Jesse Greenspan

America's Environmental Report Card: Are We Making the Grade?
By Harvey Blatt
MIT Press, 277 pages, $27.95

This book's title, America's Environmental Report Card, is slightly misleading. Instead of assigning a letter grade to America's environmental problems, geologist Harvey Blatt presents a point-by-point overview of the most pressing environmental issues facing the United States today. Some of the situations he describes are downright depressing. For instance: The United States uses 25 percent of the world's resources, though it has less than 5 percent of its population; Americans produce twice as much garbage, per capita, as the citizens of other industrialized countries; 40 percent of waterways in the United States are no longer fit for swimming or fishing; the average American car gets fewer miles to the gallon than Henry Ford's 1908 Model T; and air pollution causes 70,000 American deaths a year. Blatt sums it up in a song from the 1940s: “You had your way and now you must pay. I'll bet that you're sorry now.” More important than the problems Blatt presents, however, are his proposed solutions. Among other ideas, he favors increasing the price of water to promote resourcefulness, and making a real commitment to renewable energy. The book ends in hopeful fashion, invoking Margaret Mead's classic quote: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”

—Jesse Greenspan

Art of the Wild

In Sound of Summer Running (Nazraeli Press, 68 pages, $50), Montana-based photographer Raymond Meeks captures the lives of children (including his daughter) as they explore their rural surroundings. Nature is illuminated as their mysterious, beautiful playground: The children frolic in rolling meadows and patchy woods. Meeks breaks everything down to its simplest form, with no page numbers, virtually no text, and ample white space around the black-and-white photos. “I just appreciate space,” he says. “It allows you to pause or cleanse your palate.”

—Jesse Greenspan

© 2005 National Audubon Society

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