One Wild Bird at a Time!

Our book today is the latest from a long-time favorite here on Stevereads: it’s One Wild Bird at a Time by the great bird specialist and nature-writer Bernd Heinrich, a slim volume (filled, as always, with the author’s own illustrations) in which he meditates on one kind of bird per chapter in a warm and fast-paced mixture of observational writing and personal recollections. He writes about starlings, chickadees, blue jays, hawks, and grouse, he ruminates on crows and ravens (as befits the author of such great books as Ravens in Winter and The Mind of the Raven), and he entwines his love of owls with his love of both investigating animal behavior and writing about it:

As a high school freshman in English at the University of Maine, I was forced to write weekly essays. Thankfully I remember only one of these efforts. It was about a pair of barred owls that I observed at their nest in an old basswood tree in the forest near Pease Pond, about twenty kilometers from where I live now. I found the nest during spring break, and was so entranced by all the sounds its occupants made that I hid in the woods and listened to them for several evenings in a row. If I had met a band of just-landed aliens from another planet, I could not have been more excited than I was by these owls. I now had something to write about, and I could not not write.

As in all of Heinrich’s books, One Wild Bird at a Time is full of memorable stories and fascinating facts about its avian subjects, but the moments I found myself underlining most readily were the sometimes vinegary and always morally on-point asides that pepper the book, as when our author talks about how lucky he was to have known some crows while growing up and how he hopes some of his readers can do likewise today:

Unfortunately, it is illegal to take a live crow, although it is perfectly all right to take dead ones, after shooting them on sight for target practice. But what is legality, if it is legal to torture a goose or a duck by putting it in a cage where it can’t move, shoving a tube down its throat, and force-feeding it to make its liver fatty in order to make foie gras for people to spread on crackers?

It’s always disconcerting to think that Bernd Heinrich is approaching the end of his field-trekking days, although since he’s nearing 80 this must certainly be true. In an odd way, books like One Wild Bird at a Time counter such thoughts with a good dose of hope; there’s enough wisdom and storytelling energy in these pages to spill over into many a more armchair volume to follow, even after the hiking boots are retired to the back of the hall closet.

Originally published at Open Letters Monthly May 2016