O’Connor: Why Don’t Woodpeckers Get Headaches?

Mike O’Connor owns the Bird Watcher’s General Store at the Orleans rotary on Cape Cod, an institution celebrating, if I figure it right, its 25th jubilee next year (the store, I mean, not the rotary or Cape Cod). In those two and a half decades, he has answered thousands of questions; most, he writes, were easy–”the hard part is keeping a straight face.”

Fortunately, O’Connor doesn’t even try to keep a straight face in this little book, a compilation of questions and answers from his long-running newspaper column “Ask the Bird Folks.” Most of the queries are fairly mundane (“Is it okay to feed birds peanut butter?”), and it seems unlikely to me that most beyond-the-backyard birders will learn much of substance from the answers; but that doesn’t make the reading any less entertaining. I don’t often laugh out loud when I read a bird book, but I snickered more than twice at this one.

The greatest challenge in assembling an anthology is organizing the material, which here, by the nature of a newspaper column, tends to be thematically untidy. Backyard bird-feeding questions are covered in four sections, while another is devoted more generally to birds “you should know about,” from ostriches to the Great Auk. Equipment questions, touching on feeders, binoculars, and field guides, fill another chapter, and the book’s least interesting 20 pages are given over to identification matters. A final, miscellaneous section provides “information nobody should be without,” in reply to questions about Ludlow Griscom, White Storks, and bird sleep, among other topics.

O’Connor’s responses tend to be brief, a page or two at most, and proceed by answering the specific question (“Do we ever get Wood Ducks here?” “Yes.”) and then providing a short, simply written essay on the bird or behavior in question. These discussions are accurate, easily understood, and witty, and beginning birders and feeder-watchers, especially in the northeastern United States, will profit from them. Only very rarely did my editorial eye look askance; in his advice to the first-time field guide purchaser, O’Connor recommends books with “illustrations” over those with photographs (he means paintings, of course), and in a discussion of Picoides identification, he passes on an erroneous but frequent origin for the names “hairy” and “downy” (Catesby was in fact referring to the plumage of the back).

These matters are so trivial that even I blush in pointing them out. This is a book to be recommended to backyard birders and beginners, and to more experienced birders in search of a light-hearted read. Where else can you find such practical and entertaining advice as the suggestion that a small child tied to a long pole is the ideal way to fill feeders hung high off the ground, or the warning that chocolate ice cream fed to the birds may well draw an unwanted flock of in-laws instead? Buy it, read it, and give it to your friends and neighbors.