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The Bird Detective: Investigating the Secret Lives of Birds

by Bridget Stutchbury; Julie Zickefoose, illus

Flights of Imagination: Extraordinary Writing About Birds

by Richard Cannings, ed.

The sex lives of birds is an intriguing topic, about which most of us have little or no knowledge. Did you know, for instance, that Australian male superb fairy-wrens court their sweethearts with yellow flowers; ardent tree swallows can mate five to 10 times an hour; and female martins prefer older, more experienced partners? In The Bird Detective, the follow-up to the 2007 Governor General’s Literary Award–nominated Silence of the Songbirds, Bridget Stutchbury lets readers in on all this and much more.

It’s not easy to produce a specialized book that is simultaneously erudite and engrossing, but Stutchbury pulls it off for the most part. By alternating occasionally dense scientific material with lively first-person anecdotes, she keeps her readers turning the pages.

The 10 chapters in this book cover more than just avian love affairs. Stutchbury examines the variety and functions of birdsong and nesting habits, as well as the mysteries of migration. The tendency of some species to form bird colonies or “rookeries” is explained alongside a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of this kind of high-density avian housing.

It’s entertaining to read about the lengths to which Stutchbury and her graduate students go to make their discoveries: foregoing sleep to sit in blinds in the wee hours, swapping eggs, kidnapping nesting birds, dyeing males’ feathers, painting and then returning eggs to the nest, and even mounting miniature 1.5-gram geolocators on songbirds to track their migration. And although the occasional graphs and tables tend to confuse more than enlighten, the songbird illustrations by Julie Zickefoose are delightful. 

Stutchbury’s book is packed with information, both salacious and sage; Flights of Imagination, by contrast, is more lyrical. Edited by Richard Cannings, one of western Canada’s most respected birders, the volume is divided into four sections – “Beginnings,” “Watching Birds,” “Cycles in the Air,” and “The End of Birds” – each of which showcases good writing and pithy detail. The collection features selections by names many readers will recognize, such as novelist Barbara Kingsolver, travel writer Charles Graeber, and natural history writers Trevor Herriot, Richard Mabey, and John Hay.

Cannings’ own contribution, “Western Meadowlark,” from his 2007 book An Enchantment of Birds: Memories from a Birder’s Life, is placed in “Beginnings,” because it recounts the origins of his lifelong passion for birds. It could just as well fall in the book’s final section, however, since Cannings highlights the rapid decline of the Meadowlark population. Another contribution, “Martha’s Story,” focuses on the last surviving carrier pigeon, which died in lonely dignity in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. The focus on the depletion of bird species in many of the book’s essays highlights one of Cannings’ challenges in bringing these pieces together: illustrating the diminishment of various avian populations while also providing the reader with a sense of hope for the future. One drawback in this regard is the lack of an explicit call to action, outlining how a concerned reader might redress the problems brought up in these essays.

One of the anthology’s strengths is the eclectic nature of the individual selections, all of which have been previously published. Some date back as far as 1988, which leads a reader to question how current some of the information remains. For instance, Susan Brownmiller’s “Flying to Vietnam,” written in 1994, focuses on a bird reserve in Vietnam’s Dong Thap province. One wonders about the state of the reserve 16 years later. And do the roseates still do their mating dance on the beach that Hay so beautifully describes in “Ritual,” which was written 19 years ago?

Regardless, collecting such extraordinary writing in one place as a means of giving it new life is undoubtedly a worthy endeavor. If only such new life could be granted to the carrier pigeon.

 

Reviewer: Cherie Thiessen

Publisher: HarperCollins Canada

DETAILS

Price: $32.99

Page Count: 250 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 978-1-55468-347-5

Released: March

Issue Date: 2010-4

Categories: Science, Technology & Environment

Reviewer: Cherie Thiessen

Publisher: Greystone Books

DETAILS

Price: $21.95

Page Count: 288 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 978-1-55365-535-0

Released: March

Issue Date: April 1, 2010

Categories: Science, Technology & Environment