Zickefoose, Letters from Eden

Few are the birders who can write and paint with equal skill. Julie Zickefoose has long been among my favorites, and Letters from Eden, with its thoughtful prose and fine images, is certain to cement her reputation as one of North America’s best birding writers and painters.

Letters from Eden is handsomely and carefully produced, in a pleasing square format that lets many of the 140-odd images fill an entire page. In these images, a mix of finished paintings and working sketches, Zickefoose rejects the demands of field guide accuracy, preferring instead a more subjective, more artistic, and all in all more satisfying brand of birderly realism. Her style is “soft,” without any of the harsh, would-be photographic surrealism of so many illustrators nowadays; yet the artist’s intellectual honesty and visual rigor never let her work descend into Hallmark blurriness: there is sentiment here, but no sentimentality. Zickefoose draws and paints with flair and wit, and viewers of her paintings will find themselves smiling in immediate recognition of the birds and the scene they so delightfully inhabit. It is difficult to fix on a favorite, but the Evening Grosbeaks (17), plump as the apples they perch beside, are the perfect embodiments of a midwestern snowstorm; every bit as evocative, Yellow-breasted Chats (42-43) dance in front of an unseen plum thicket, and European Starlings (77) join noisy battle in the grass.

It would have been easy to let the charm of these paintings ‘carry’ the book, but Zickefoose’s prose here is far more than simply annotation, just as the pictures are more than mere “illustration.” The brief essays are grouped by season, perhaps inevitably, and most of them take as their impetus an observation or an incident on the 80 acres Zickefoose and her family live on. The casual reader will find real pleasure in dipping in to the book, opening it at random to gracefully told anecdotes about box turtles and bluebirds, starlings and bullfrogs, phoebes and copperheads. The ease of the author’s prose is as great as that of her paintings, and, as we have come to expect from Houghton Mifflin, typographical errors are trivial and scarce (page 80 offers both of the only two examples discovered on a first reading: “avia” means ‘grandmother’, not ‘bird’, and the well-meaning amateur responsible for the introduction of European Starlings to this continent spelled his name “Schieffelin,” if rightly I remember).

Pleasant as they are simply to browse through, Zickefoose’s essays deserve to be read as a body, when the serious thread that runs through them all becomes apparent. Like all good natural historians, Zickefoose describes her task as observation: things happen, she writes, “simply because I am looking, and seeing, and present”; her work, our work as birders, is the work of noticing. The phenomena of nature are made manifest unpredictably but not accidentally; gifts, she notes, come only to those who make ready to receive them. Observation, thus, gives way to action and to caring: taking sick turtles to the doctor, hanging gourds for inexplicably finicky martins, mowing around rather than over careless woodcocks.

The importance of this book, however, comes clear in Zickefoose’s meditations on what can happen when that caring, so salutary on its face, becomes the desire for control, for the ability to evoke the beautiful and to forestall the violent at will. Human efforts at control lead to a “blind corner.” “If we didn’t mow,” the author writes, “the woodcocks would have no place to stage their displays or lay their eggs. Yet our mowing [is] the single greatest threat to their reproductive success.” Zickefoose solves this dilemma easily, mowing half of her tangled field, leaving the other for the woodcocks’ nests. In other circumstances, though, the illusion of control is the source of what she calls, honestly and convincingly, horror. The innocent introduction of a voracious bullfrog into a constructed pond leads to violence no more acceptable to Zickefoose than that caused by a careless child run amok with an armful of leghold traps. Humans have a place in the world of nature, but that world exists properly apart from us, too. The “Eden” from which Zickefoose writes, like the real Eden, is a place where human muddling (take posthumous note, Eugene Schieffelin!) can too easily become presumption, with consequences we can sometimes neither abide nor understand.

Better, Zickefoose tells us, to accept that control is not always ours. Sometimes, it is up to a Brown Thrasher to run our lives. “I had let a bird tell me how to spend my Saturday, and that was fine with me.” It’s fine with us, too, if the result is a book as wonderful and as thoughtful as Letters from Eden.