Tonight on my way home, though, an unmistakable twitch caught my eye–and there at the mailboxes, just a couple of turns down the long driveway from our place, was a Greater Roadrunner, stalking through the creosotes and saguaros, tail raised and head lowered in search of whom he might devour.

As I drove past, I whispered the magic words–”Gambel’s Quail, baby Gambel’s Quail…”–in hopes that he might follow me to partake of the galliform abundance in our yard proper. Hasn’t shown yet, but maybe soon!

Today, though, everybody else found it, and the goldfinches have been hanging around on the margins of avian society, waiting for their greedier cousins to take a breath.

It’s the ground feeders who profit most from the leaky design of our fancy new fodder station. It took the Gambel’s Quail no time at all to discover the overflow–and, of course, to bring the kids, too.

Looking into the Santa Catalinas across the driveway.

Jonathan Rosen’s Life of the Skies is a wide-ranging and often brilliant exploration of the relationship between humans, birds, and the worlds of nature and culture in a way that birders will find convincing and non-birders truly eye-opening.

The breadth of topics covered here—from Ivory-billed Woodpeckers to Robert Frost, from sex-determined brain function to Sufi mysticism—is hardly susceptible to easy summation, but Rosen comes again and again to a convincing and “powerful sense that the human scene on the ground [is] just as remarkable and, more than that, an integral part of … birding”—and it is precisely that human scene, historical, cultural, biographical, and autobiographical that is explored here.

Life of the Skies is professedly not a history of birding, though the book’s first chapters recite severral of the great foundational narratives. Rosen goes beyond the familiar stories and personalities to offer penetrating analyses of other figures traditionally thought of, if at all, as peripheral to the history of birds in America. Particularly rewarding is the discussion of Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking,” a poem that in Rosen’s tour-de-force reading marks Whitman’s rejection of the romantic tradition, as he recognized, painfully, that true poetry arises not out of our experience of nature but out of our tragic awakening into dislocation. I would suggest that Robert Frost’s “Auspex,” likewise the subject of a thorough and thoroughly engaging explication here, is about the same matter: the lyrical voice of the poem, an anti-Ganymede, becomes a poet precisely because he is denied the unio mystica the appearance of the great dark bird at first promises.

As Rosen’s subtitle suggests, these past two centuries have seen nature so thoroughly civilized, and civilization so completely naturalized, that it is impossible to know where one begins and the other leaves off. The intellectual result, Rosen argues, is a sort of anxious solipsism, and birding overcomes that anxiety by both affirming the persistence of an external reality and reassuring us that we can participate in it. “Birdwatching,” says Rosen, “is all about the balance,” the re-establishment of an equilibrium between the internal complexities of human life and the external beingness of the world. As a “mediating” activity, birding both restores this balance and keeps us constantly aware of our need for it.

Rosen’s Part II, less rigorously structured and more miscellaneous, presents a series of examples of how birders and ornithologists have achieved that balance. The central figure discussed here is Alfred Russell Wallace, the inventor of biogeography and the ill-timed discoverer of the first principles of evolution. Reversing the great naturalist’s own perspective, Rosen compares Wallace’s relation to nature and culture to that of the Aru natives he “studied,” concluding that the “primitives” were in fact no closer to nature than Wallace—or than we are. We just inhabit a different “nature,” one that we are simultaneously a part of and apart from. Birding, in Jonathan Rosen’s formulation, is the attempt to reconcile those circumstances, to find a wholeness in all the fractured complexity of life. Often enough, it works.

As the trees and bushes of the Sonoran desert green up with the monsoon, the softball-sized clumps near the tips of many of their branches become more obvious. Most people assume that they are witches’ brooms or some other pathology, but birders know: this is where the Verdins hang out.

These unsightly clumps of twigs and junk–often enough containing shredded paper, plastic, even fishing line or metal strapping–are actually comfy, dry, feather-lined chambers carefully constructed by the male Verdin, who generally builds at least three a season: one for himself, one for his lady friend to roost in, and one for the eggs and nestlings. In the early spring when they are still new, the nests can be almost perfectly globular, but by the time they are several months old, as now, they come to be a bit squashed, and it’s easy to think they are disused when they are in fact still inhabited. More than once I’ve stood under one to show it to my companions–and had a Verdin pop out to remind us of the nest’s possessor.

We swung past to pick up Nigel, then headed south through one of those unspeakably beautiful monsoon mornings: the ocotillos glowing green, the hillsides lush, the skies as richly in-folded as the mountains. First stop: Las Cienegas, where it took us an hour to drive the couple of miles from the highway down to the creek.

There was much to slow us down, from a lovely Swainson’s Hawk overhead to a mixed flock of Lark Sparrows and Horned Larks creeping along the roadside. But we spent the most and the most enjoyable time of all watching Botteri’s Sparrows sing at close range, their stutters jump-starting the birder’s heart as surely as the sweet whistles of the Lilian’s Meadowlarks beyond them.

Finally we were at the creek, where Yellow-breasted Chats surrounded us, giving us the usual tantalizing glimpses and the occasional full-on view as they rattled and croaked and piped from the willows and cottonwoods. Summer Tanagers, Common Yellowthroats, Song Sparrows, and Bewick’s Wrens were as abundant, and the single Bell’s Vireo we heard was outnumbered two to one by Western Warbling-Vireos, migrants from the high-mountain breeding range. Also on the move were a few Black-headed Grosbeaks–autumn comes fast in the desert. The two Gray Hawks screaming and wheeling overhead were probably local birds, though, likely the pair that nests each year just downstream in the tall cottonwoods.

Hard to leave, but given that our stated destination for the day had been Patagonia, it was time to move on. One of our party was on the way to a “milestone” bird, so we decided that it should be a good one, and headed straight for Mrs. Paton’s feeders.

And Sonoita Creek.

Where the water had stopped flowing.

And the new silt and gravel proved only slightly deeper than the diameter of Darlene’s van’s tires.

And soft.

Much pushing, much shoving, a little grunting and muttering, and we managed to get it a good 18 inches closer to the pavement. Then, to our good fortune, a kind local family with a truck and a chain arrived, and within minutes the van was back on dry pavement, as the deep hole where it had been resting quickly filled with silty water.

Finding lunch in town the better part of valor, we hopped into the cafe just as the skies opened and the rain poured down; there’s something about watching the monsoon from inside and over food, the vehicle safely parked a mile from the nearest creekbed, that warms the cockles. And Marcee got her milestone: not the promised Violet-crowned Hummingbird, but a busy Cassin’s Kingbird hunting the Patagonia city park.

How she spotted this lovely little western diamondback I’ll never know, but it’s a good thing she did, and I’ll be careful tomorrow when I bring the empty containers back to the house.

The little guy was absolutely docile, and we hope that he survives the perils of a suburban night to feast on quail chicks, jumping mice, and whatever else the yard has to offer him. Next time, though, it would be nice if he’d rattle in a friendly way just so we know where he’s hanging out!

More and more I find birders reluctant to say “swallows” or “swallows and martins,” reaching instead for the Latinate “hirundine.” To my mind, there’s no reason not to write and speak English, but if you need to sound learned, at least be learned. “Hirundine” is an adjectival noun formed from the genus name Hirundo, and thus refers only to the swallows in that genus–when a North American birder claims to have seen a mixed flock of “hirundines,” she has had a spectacular sighting indeed, since only one species has ever been recorded on the continent. A mixed flock of hirundines is possible only in the African and Australasian regions, where “our” familiar Barn Swallow occurs alongside a varying selection of a dozen congeners.

What a European or American birder more likely means is that he has seen a flock of hirundinids. That is the adjectival noun derived from the family name Hirundinidae, and it includes all the swallows and martins in the world. A mixed flock of hirundinids is a fine thing on a summer’s day, and I look forward to sorting through one with you soon. Just don’t call them “hirundines,” please.

A blurry Gray-breasted Martin– a wonderful tropical hirundinid, but most decidedly not a hirundine.