Archive for Book Reviews
Amadeo Rea: Wings in the Desert
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The significance of birds to the native Americans resident from the Gila River south to central Sonora went far beyond the material. As Amadeo Rea’s rich new ethno-ornithology reports, many of the species recognized by the Northern Pimans bore great ritual and cultural significance as well: it takes seven pages, for example, to summarize the Great Horned Owl’s role, from omen of death to ghost to vector of “staying sickness” to source of healing. Black-tailed Gnatcatchers figure prominently and charmingly in lullabies, where the male’s dark cap is compared to the shining black hair of a Piman baby. And the Verdin is even accorded the status of a “power bird,” able to summon destructive rains and to lure people to sleep. Throughout the species accounts, Rea offers abundant direct quotations of songs, poems, and ritual orations, often in transliterated Piman and in English translation.
In his introductory chapters, Rea regrets the “abrupt collapse in the biological lexicon” that took place just about the time his consultants were born; the generations that followed have undergone an “aggressive homogenization” that has cemented the loss of so much linguistic tradition. Birders and anyone with an interest in the cultural past of the landscapes of the Southwest can be grateful that so sensitive an observer and so sophisticated an ornithologist as Amadeo Rea has presented us with the remnants of what was obviously a rich and fascinating folk science.
My full review of this title will appear in Birding magazine later this year.
The Field Guide: A Panel at the Tucson Festival of Books
Posted by: | CommentsI hope you’ll all join Elizabeth Rosenthal, Jon Dunn, and me at this year’s Tucson Festival of Books for a panel discussion on the history, significance, and future of the field guide.
Liz is the author of an important biography of Roger Tory Peterson, Jon one of the best and best-known birders and authors on the North American scene.
Our discussion starts at 1:00 pm on Saturday, March 13. And here’s a secret: Jon will be leading a free walk for Tucson Audubon that weekend, too, a great chance to sample the WINGS experience.
See you there!
Hutchcraft: B Is For Bufflehead
Posted by: | CommentsIt’s been a great year for bird books, and as I look back on it, I surprise myself by counting among my favorites a title intended in the first instance for hands too tiny to lift binoculars.
As its title and its layout make clear, Steve Hutchcraft’s B Is For Bufflehead is an “alphabet book”–a stunningly illustrated alphabet book–for the youngest not-yet-readers. But there’s much more to this book than that title and that layout might suggest. As the author and photographer’s afterword points out, Bufflehead was carefully designed for the changing needs of children as they pass from pre-school innocence to information-hungry adolescence; the result is a book whose multiple layers can be plumbed with pleasure even by adults.
With a couple of exceptions, each letter of the alphabet is illustrated by spectacular photos of two bird species, one for the upper case, one for the lower; in a couple of instances, two photos of the same species serve, while “W”–for wren and for warbler–is graced with photos of half a dozen parulids and four troglodytids. All but a couple of the photographs ( including that of Red-faced Warbler, unfortunately) are of the first quality, many of them showing the birds in engagingly outlandish poses or doing interesting things. I particularly like Hutchcraft’s fondness for the unexpected: sure, D is for Duck, but K is for Kiskadee and X is for Xantus’s Murrelet–two birds I can’t recall ever having seen in a children’s book, and both of them the more welcome for it.
Each photo is accompanied by a short text; these snippets of prose are in the first person, as if spoken by the bird itself. More often than not, these soliloquies mention a notable behavior for the reader to look out for, and in one case–that of the Yellow-billed Magpie–the bird laments its own conservation status. Thankfully, Hutchcraft is able to avoid the cloying and the cute in these passages, though there are occasional breaches of diction: the Caracara claims that it can “dominate my competitors at every feeding frenzy,” while the Yellow-billed Cuckoo on the facing page observes that caterpillars are “yummy, yummy in my tummy.” I feel honor-bound, too, to defend the Zone-tailed Hawk from the Turkey Vulture’s accusation of “meanness.”
The fifty-two pages of alphabet birds are followed by two openings of quiz photos, including eight images of chicks and nestlings that are sure to appeal to the book’s youngest audience. There follows a brief encyclopedia describing the range, habitat, and food habits of each of the species included in the book, along with two or three “fun feathered facts” for each. These pages are incredibly rich in information, just the sort of stuff that a bright older child (or an adult new to birding) will devour and digest. A very nice touch is the inclusion of the locality at which each photo was taken.
There are a couple of instances in these last pages where a small error or minor unclarity creeps in. It’s not true that female Wood Ducks “do all the courting,” and though I suppose a Bald Eagle could “dive at over 100 mph,” I very much doubt that one has ever bothered. Xantus’s Murrelet, scarce as it is, is far from the “rarest of all seabirds.” I’m intrigued by the idea that “thinner” Black-crested Titmouses are dominant over “fatter” individuals in flocks.
These are niggles and quibbles, and none of them (and none of the few minor typos scattered through the book) should keep those of us with young friends from putting this book in their hands. And who knows, maybe next year those hands will be raising a pair of binoculars to look at the birds of their neighborhood.
Alessandro Croseri: The Pigeoneers
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Towards the end of his reminiscences, the 103-year-old narrator of Al Croseri’s new documentary grows wistful as he reflects on the need to cull the homing pigeon flocks that were for decades at the center of his life. You can’t keep the losers, he says, or the winners will suffer.
Croseri’s film, a lengthy and detailed monologue by the last surviving “pigeoneer,” faces a similar problem–but one that can’t be solved. For, simply put, there are no losers among the anecdotes and images compiled by the director of the splendid The Flight. As a result, Pigeoneers, for all the fascinating material it assembles, will strike many viewers as a little on the long side, better perhaps for dipping into than for consuming at a single sitting.
The film begins with a dramatic, and dramatically scored, montage of vintage photos and film clips depicting the activities of the Army Pigeon Corps. “Culling” some of these elements might have made the entry of Colonel Clifford A. Poutre more effective, but they do provide a visual context for the stories that fill the rest of Poutre’s monologue.
Not all of those stories are specifically about his work with pigeons. We learn, for example, that the later colonel slept on the floor as a toddler because he knew even then that he wanted to be a soldier, and that his career as an army bugler was cut short when he found himself moved one evening to offer an unwanted encore. For the most part tightly narrated, sometimes charming, some of these anecdotes can also wander, and much or all, for instance, of the rather pointless story of the weedy ballfield could easily have been cut.
Poutre’s entry into military pigeoneering turns out to have been a whimsical, even an arbitrary choice. The affection with which he relates his subsequent experiences, from New Jersey to Hawaii, is constantly obvious, though, and birders and other viewers without, perhaps, a consuming interest in domestic pigeons as such will nonetheless learn something here and there. Pigeons released at sea, for example, will fly up to 100 miles back to their Pacific island homes, even at night, but reveal a notable reluctance to cross mountains. Pigeons returning to their lofts through the dark skies of the Hawaiian islands could attain speeds of up to 60 miles an hour, while the bright lights of metropolitan New York slowed their progress considerably–an observation of manifest relevance to the behavior of wild migratory birds.
Among the carefully chosen images are some very disturbing ones showing the relationship between pigeons, their handlers, and native raptors. I leave it to the reader to guess which of those parties is represented in the vintage photos by proudly displayed corpses.
His long career as an Army pigeoneer brought Colonel Poutre into contact with a number of well-known figures in the 1940s and 1950s. For example, he knew Ding Darling–but unfortunately, the account of that acquaintance trails off into the anecdote of a bizarre publicity stunt, with no further mention of the great conservationist.
Most fascinating of all is Poutre’s friendship with Nikola Tesla, an impassioned pigeon handler in the last years of his life. For reasons inscrutable, though, rather than simply allowing Poutre to tell the story of this strange relationship, the director introduces this segment of his film with nearly fifteen minutes (!) of Fiorello Laguardia’s radio tribute to the great inventor; by the time the colonel’s own reminiscences commence, the viewer may wonder whether she has somehow stepped into a different film. A careful cull here would have worked wonders for the film’s coherence.
In general, one gets the impression, perhaps unfairly, that Croseri found himself, understandably enough, incapable of reducing the mass of fine material he had assembled for his film. But the viewer who sticks with the documentary will all the same be richly rewarded–and will inevitably come to share the director’s obvious affection for his centenarian narrator, whose death not long after the completion of filming marked the end of a fascinating phase in the relationship between birds and those who love them.
Review: Princeton Encyclopedia of Birds
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It used to be–and probably is no more–that the most telling insult one could offer to a bookish schoolchild was to spread the rumor that she spent her time “reading the dictionary.” It was never true, of course–actually reading a reference work is something only those charged with the writing of a book review would ever consider. Not even the most voracious, the most obsessive readers would think of consuming their encyclopedias and dictionaries and almanacs and atlases seriatim and at a single sitting.
“Reading” the dictionary, or the handsome and heavy Princeton Encyclopedia of Birds, for that matter, is instead a process of browsing, of letting one thing lead to the other, of following up the questions inevitably posed by the answers. And there are answers aplenty in the PEB, a splendidly illustrated reference to all the bird families of the world.
Organized taxonomically, the family entries are preceded by front matter comprising a general introduction to the anatomical unica that make a bird a bird; there is also a surprisingly, and probably inappropriately, specialized discussion of passerine classification.
The family accounts follow a standard pattern: paragraphs on “form and function” treat the physical adaptations characteristic of the taxon, and breeding behavior is treated at fascinating length for most groups. Most of the bad news is concentrated at the end of the entries, where the conservation status of the family’s species is detailed. For particularly diverse or well-known groups, more precise information about distribution, diet, and general behavior is also provided. For users in a hurry, shaded boxes–”sidebars,” I suppose they’re called–briefly summarize the family’s nomenclature, species diversity, distribution and habitat, size range, nest and egg characteristics, diet, plumage and voice peculiarities, and conservation status; a small map depicts the family’s native range, and an amusing graphic compares a silhouetted representative with a human body part. Given this wealth of information, the curious browser can learn all about asities, mesites, and other relatively unfamiliar groups, and nearly every page reveals a tiny nugget of novelty somewhere.
The relevance of that novelty isn’t always immediately apparent. Among the dozens and hundreds of things to learn, we’re told in a photo caption that Mugimaki Flycatcher “is a far-eastern forest species whose name means ’sowing wheat’ in Japanese.” I’m entranced–but nowhere in the text is there so much as a speculation on why the bird should have such a name. Occasionally such mysterious utterances are simply wrong: sinensis Great Cormorants and Pygmy Cormorants are far from being “the family’s only true migrants.” But outright inaccuracy is rare in this book, and in the weeks it’s been on my shelf, I’ve used it a number of times as an authority to verify statements from other sources that seemed–and sometimes were–too outlandish even for birds.
The PEB is, if I understand correctly, a gently revised reprint of the second edition of the Firefly Encyclopedia. The text has been largely Americanized, though the occasional “aeroplane” seems to have slipped through; the use of “Stone Curlew” to refer to the family better known in the western hemisphere as thick-knees is also a bit of British palimpsest. I was disappointed to see that the revisions and updates did not extend to the list of contributors, many of whose institutional affiliations are now out of date and a few of whom, sadly, should have a dagger next to their name. The list also truncates Lester Short’s initials.
Any user spending time with this book will soon enough find its poor proofreading a source of annoyance. There are few outright misspellings (“retrices,” as on p. 22, always gets my goat), but it’s unfortunate that the first one–a missing hyphen in “spoon-billed”–should occur on the copyright page. Much more serious is the abysmal punctuation, which makes the text anything but a pleasure to read; the use of commas often seems to be merely decorative, and exclamation points show up in the strangest places.
Equally strange is the capitalization (or not) of bird names in the text. I do not belong to the camp of those who capitalize species names as “proper nouns”–but I have a lot of sympathy with the practice when (as in my b-log, come to think of it) it is intended to make scanning easier. All the same, lower-case species names don’t bother me at all, and the old chestnuts about not all yellow warblers’ being Yellow Warblers just don’t hold water (to mix a metaphor). It’s a fairly simple editorial decision–but one that wasn’t made here at all. Instead, it seems that the proofreader has decided to capitalize the first word of every species name and nothing more, giving us such weird artifacts as “Great blue herons” and “Cattle egrets.” Such forms are particularly risible in the case of long names: who would ever think to write “Southern rough-winged swallow”? And I really don’t know what to think of “Wood warbler.”
My complaints are serious, but they are not intended to detract from the great usefulness and the occasional pleasure of this book. It’s here that I learned that Marabous have hollow toes, and that Darwin’s rhea was discovered at the dinner table. Such gems would be the more accessible to the curious user if the book’s index allowed us to look them up using English species names instead of just the scientific names–a good discipline, I suppose, to be forced to learn them all, but surely it would have been easier to give the monolingual reader a page number than to chide her with a cross-reference.
Of course, it’s probably quicker, easier, and heaven knows lighter (all that glossy photo paper!) to look all these things up on the internet (where you can actually learn why the flycatcher is called “Mugimaki”); the days of printed encyclopedias are, inevitably, numbered. But until e-references are constructed in such a way that they can be not just consulted but browsed–even, I suppose, read, if you must–nothing can substitute for the chance to be led from one fascinating topic to the other, as this richly illustrated book does so well.
