ABA Blog

Pennsylvania: The Second Snapshot

A review by Troy Corman

Second Atlas of Breeding Birds in Pennsylvania, edited by Andrew M. Wilson, Daniel W. Brauning, and Robert S. Mulvihill

Penn State University Press, 2012

586 pages, $64.95—hardcover

ABA Sales / Buteo Books 13906

I was raised in rural south-central Pennsylvania, but moved away before fieldwork began in 1983 for the state’s first breeding bird atlas. Fortunately, though, projects like this are designed to be repeated, and when data collection for the second atlas started, twenty years later, I was able to spend a week or so of several consecutive Junes in the same forests and along the same streams and trails where my passion for the outdoors and birding had first taken flight, a passion that has guided my career path ever since.

Pennsylvania may not be a major U.S. birding destination, but its varied landscapes attract a remarkable selection of both resident and migratory breeding birds—at least 208 native and established exotic species are confirmed to have bred there, among them an amazing 30 species of warblers. That rich species diversity and the commonwealth’s long and impressive history of ornithological investigation is the subject of several books, including the first Atlas of Breeding Birds in Pennsylvania, published in 1992.

As dedicated atlasers already know, the production of a breeding bird atlas requires monumental effort on the part of hundreds, if not thousands, of skilled volunteer birders and professional ornithologists. And it all has to be repeated. As the North American Ornithological Atlas Committee notes, “The tremendous value of breeding bird atlases will only begin to be realized when each state or province completes their second atlas. At that time, two ‘snapshots’ in time of breeding bird distributions will be available for comparison and conclusions can be reached about the changes in distributions that have occurred.” Repeated atlasing, of course, also provides data on population trends, which can prompt research and conservation efforts for declining species and the habitats on which they depend.

Data for Pennsylvania’s second atlas were collected from 2004 to 2009, and the new book that resulted from that work provides us with an up-to-date overview of the current distribution and status of each breeding species, plus a tremendous amount of insightful analysis.

Early chapters in the Second Atlas discuss the goals and purpose of the project. The project framework and survey methods remained largely the same from the first to the second atlas, though there were efforts made to capture certain aspects missing from the first: For example, field crews were hired this time around to take point counts measuring the geographic variability of species abundance. One of my favorite sections in the new Atlas is the enlightening chapters describing the state’s geography, habitat, and land use. The many color maps and vivid descriptions provide a thorough introduction to the physical aspects of Pennsylvania’s environment that influence the distribution and abundance of the avian life that breeds there. 

Another brief chapter, “Interpreting Species Accounts,” greatly increases the reader’s appreciation of the many fine details to be gleaned from each of the 190 two-page accounts, prepared by no fewer than 52 authors. Those authors and the book’s editors—Andrew M. Wilson, Daniel W. Brauning, and Robert S. Mulvihill—have taken full advantage of technologies and analytical methods that have emerged since publication of the first Atlas, making this second a sharply attractive, revealing, and masterfully prepared book.

Each species account includes a very good to excellent color photo, often, aptly, depicting adults at the nest or engaged in other breeding behavior. As expected, comparison of the data collected for each of the atlases is a significant part of these accounts; distribution changes (or their absence) are noted, and the Pennsylvania information is often compared with that discovered by second atlasing efforts in some adjacent states and provinces, thus placing apparent trends into a regional context.

Understandably, there is an obvious effort to avoid duplicating information already captured in the first Atlas. However, I find it mildly disappointing that so much natural history information has been omitted from the new species accounts. Appendix F in the Second Atlas provides a tabular summary of phenological data for most species; I would have liked to see some explicit discussion of the differences in breeding phenology discovered between the two atlases. Data continues to accumulate suggesting that the average timing of some species’ migration and nesting has already begun to shift, shifts possibly related to climate change.     

The second page of each account features two or three easily interpreted statewide maps. The first and largest depicts where the species was detected during the second atlas. Any changes in distribution between the two atlases are clearly noted on the second map. In the case of more common and widespread species, a third map depicts the geographic density of singing males as determined by point counts.

Each account also includes a table showing the number of blocks in which the species was identified by each atlasing project as a possible, a probable, or a confirmed breeder; changes between the two atlases are expressed as a percentage. Worrisome numbers include those for the Red-headed Woodpecker, which declined by 46 percent, and for the Golden-winged Warbler, down 61 percent between the two atlases. Compare that with the incredible increases in breeding Common Ravens—114 percent—and Bald Eagles—949 percent! These changes are discussed in detail in each account, with insightful suggestions as to why specific species have declined or increased, or why their distribution in the state has shifted.        

Appendix A includes brief accounts for a dozen former nesting species and a table listing ten additional birds that have not been documented nesting in Pennsylvania since the 1970s or before, including the Heath Hen and the Passenger Pigeon. Oddly missing from this list is the Glossy Ibis, noted in the first Atlas as a confirmed breeder on the Susquehanna River in the 1970s.

Few other resources provide so complete a picture of bird distribution over time as a breeding bird atlas, and few are so helpful in the long-term monitoring of avian populations. It is hard to imagine that any birder would not want a copy of the Second Atlas, whether in Pennsylvania or anywhere in the region, a region that stretches as far north as Quebec and as far west as Ontario (both jurisdictions, by the way, with magnificent atlas projects of their own). An exceptional summary of a large amount of data, presented in a sharp and impressive tome, this work sets a new standard for atlases to come.

It may take up a lot of space on your bookshelf, but as an informative and inspiring reference, the Second Atlas of Breeding in Birds in Pennsylvania is a worthy tenant. I am honored to be one of the many who participated in this endeavor. As much as I learned while helping collect data, I continued to be enlightened as I reviewed this fine resource.

Troy Corman is a biologist in the Arizona Game and Fish Department, where he coordinates long-term statewide bird monitoring projects. He coordinated the Arizona breeding bird atlas project and served as co-editor of the Arizona Breeding Bird Atlas (2005). Corman is president and a founding member of the Arizona Field Ornithologists. His interests include the distribution and seasonal status of birds, conservation, and travel.

Recommended citation:

Corman, T. 2013. Pennsylvania: The Second Snapshot [a review of Second Atlas of Breeding Birds in Pennsylvania, edited by Andrew M. Wilson, Daniel W. Brauning, and Robert S. Mulvhill]. Birding 45(3):67.

Bird Books for Children

A review by Hannah Floyd

 

Song for Papa Crow

by Marit Menzin

Schiffer Publishing, 2012

32 pages, $16.99–hardcover

Nighthawk!

by Jamie Bastedo

Red Deer Press, 2013

245 pages, $12.95–softcover

 

In Marit Menzin's Song for Papa Crow (2012), a young crow "learns to appreciate his voice." The author of our review, Hannah Floyd, is doing the very same thing as she makes her debut here as the youngest writer yet to be published in the pages of Birding. I think you will agree that this second-grader's voice is already an appreciable one, and it comes through loud, clear, and unmistakable in both her writing-as-intellectual-pursuit and her writing-as-physical-activity. To preserve for our readers the powerful and disappearing unity of word and script, and to show how easy this reviewer has made her editor's task, we present Hannah's review in her own words, her own pictures, and her own hand.

- Rick Wright, Book Review Editor

I can't imagine why anyone would want to, but you can click here to read the very lightly edited transcript of the review.

 

Recommended citation:

Floyd, H. 2013. Bird Books for Children [a review of Song for Papa Crow, by Marit Menzin, and Nighthawk!, by Jamie Bastedo]. Birding 45(3):68.

Pitoreal

A review by Jim Williams

 

Imperial Dreams: Tracking the Imperial Woodpecker Through the Wild Sierra Madre

by Tim Gallagher

Atria Books, 2013

304 pages, $26–softcover

This is a book about another Tim Gallagher search for a bird long unseen. It’s a story of extreme birding—extreme in concept and in undertaking. It’s a story of a treasure hunt in the Sierra Madre of Mexico. It has danger, bad guys, and an old map.

You remember Tim. He’s the fellow who with a friend reported an Ivory-billed Woodpecker in an Arkansas swamp in 2004. Subsequently, Gallagher’s employer, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, brought dozens of people to Arkansas to continue the search. As chronicled in Gallagher's The Grail Bird (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), it was a successful effort. There were many more reports.

This new book is about the Imperial Woodpecker of Mexico, cousin to the Ivory-billed, but bigger: a woodpecker two feet long from tail to the end of its chisel bill.

Let’s make this point early: Ten words in to the book’s first sentence, Gallagher writes: “[T]here once lived a woodpecker…” Which does not slow him down a bit.

Gallagher's Grail Bird is a fine book about the Ivory-billed adventure . His subject then was current, in the news, a subject of debate. His new book, Imperial Dreams: Tracking the Imperial Woodpecker through the Wild Sierra Madre, tells a different story, a different kind of story.

The Ivory-billed search began on a trail six days old. Gallagher followed a tip. The Imperial Woodpecker comes with no hot tips. Gallagher’s information on thinly possible sightings ranges in age from six years to six decades.

Gallagher is a man of dreams and firm beliefs, and his books, including The Grail Bird and the gripping memoir Falcon Fever (Houghton Mifflin 2008), identify him as a man of obsessions. He is not easily discouraged, and Imperial Dreams covers five woodpecker searches in the Sierra Madre, most extensively his final trip in 2010.

This is an adventure story as much as, or more than, it is a bird story. If you’ve ever hiked long and hard in search of a bird, been wet for days, slept on the ground, eaten poorly, you’ll relate to this tale. It is likely to exceed any memories of your own worst trip. Gallagher many times mentions encounters with narcotraficantes. They carry AK-47 rifles; this is their land.

You will learn a good deal about the Imperial Woodpecker. The book is a history of its habits, its habitats, and the people who have seen it. There is mention of the other Campephilus woodpeckers of Central and South America; our Ivory-billed was not the only child in that family.

There’s a chapter about the Apaches and their famous chief Geronimo, who once used these mountains as sanctuary. Consider him a good guy in this context: The danger of running into his band of followers kept settlers and loggers out of the area until the late 1930s. Loggers destroyed woodpecker habitat; settlers ate the birds.

Gallagher and his companions—most often Martjan Lammertink, the Campephilus woodpecker expert from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and always a Mexican guide or two—search out people, usually very old people, who have seen the Imperial. Residents call the bird pitoreal. The searchers follow stories and rumors, letters, and a map drawn by Mexican graduate students in the 1970s. The map came into the hands of David Allen, son of Cornell's own Arthur A. Allen, who gave it to Gallagher. The Allens had seen the woodpecker in the 1940s.

The map lacked an X-dig-here mark. Gallagher managed to find one of the grad students, then in his nineties. Age and a stroke had wiped his mind of woodpecker details.

None of what Gallagher and his companions were doing was simple or easy or, often, even safe. Deep into the 2010 trip, tight-roping his way along the rocky edge of a deep canyon, Gallagher reaches his limit. Soaked with sweat, vision blurred, gut knotted, heart first fluttering then pounding, he passes out and rolls off the edge. Ten feet down, he and his backpack are stopped by a small tree, the only thing for 50 feet fore or aft that could have kept him from splatting on the rocks an echo below.

They were heading for a mesa topped with old-growth pine, the disappearing habitat of the Imperial. Logging and people with guns who shot the birds for food or sport were, or possibly are, the survival problems. (Gallagher speculates that timber harvesters also shot the birds to be rid of that environmental conflict.) Atop the mesa, scanning the valley below for birds, their glasses pick up a neat rectangle of tended crop—opium poppies. They find these often, and the discoveries quicken their step.

I say “were or are” the problem because there is no problem if there are no Imperial Woodpeckers. Gallagher does not see one. He doesn’t hear one. He finds no conclusive sign. He writes of them in the past tense. But he hopes. The Sierra Madre region where this search is centered held the birds, and it is huge, about 90,000 square miles. Its basic inaccessibility makes Arkansas or Louisiana swamps look like parkland. It’s like the Ivory-billed story was for years and years: It’s hard to prove a negative.

If you want to see the bird yourself, there is a film, made in 1956 by a dentist from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, named William Rhein. On the last of his four trips into the Sierra, he shot 85 seconds of 16mm film of the bird. He kept the film to himself because its quality did not meet his standards. It was found some years ago thanks to Lammertink’s detective work. Eventually, it was given to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

A realist, Gallagher ends the book with hopeful comments on changes made by the Mexican government that might improve Sierra Madre conservation and reduce the presence of drug gangsters. He also gives this cautionary note: If you want to continue the search yourself, "you stand a far better chance of getting killed in the Sierra Madre now than of ever seeing a pitoreal.”

- Jim Williams writes about birds for the Minneapolis StarTribune. He also does bird photography and writes a birding blog for the paper. He was associate editor of Birding from 1998 to 2003. Most of his birding is done in his Minnesota neighborhood.

Recommended citation:

Williams, J. 2013. Pitoreal [a review of Imperial Dreams, by Tim Gallagher]. Birding 45(3):66.

What Lies Beneath?

A review by Donna Schulman

 

The Unfeathered Bird

by Katrina van Grouw

Princeton University Press, 2013

304 pages, $49.95—hardcover

ABA Sales / Buteo Books 13698

Remember those crinkly transparent overlays in the anatomy articles of your childhood encyclopedia? The blood vessels, then the muscles, then the organs. Or maybe it was the other way around. Eventually came the bones, and that was the best part, because bones were supposed to be scary—but those diagrams were strangely beautiful.

I felt the same combination of wonder and mystery when I examined the illustrations in The Unfeathered Bird, a unique book on anatomy and art and birds. As an art student in Great Britain twenty-five years ago, Katrina van Grouw conceived the mission of creating a volume that would combine the authority of an ornithological text with the visual beauty of nineteenth-century scientific illustration. The result is a large and elegant book, well designed and well produced, printed on thick cream-colored paper and composed in typefaces that echo those of pre-industrial times. At the heart of The Unfeathered Bird are the book’s more than 300 drawings: They are simply beautiful, in spite of the fact—because of the fact—that they depict bones and muscles.

The book is divided into two parts. The first, “Generic,” presents the blueprint for avian flight. Here we learn the basics of bird anatomy, especially the adaptations—a rigid trunk, a lightweight skeleton, and a flexible neck—that enable a bird to fly. The second, much longer part, “Specific,” comprises forty-one chapters devoted to taxonomic groups, mostly orders and families, and focuses on the anatomical variations, some familiar, some bizarre, that have evolved over the ages.

These “specific” chapters are grouped into six sections, corresponding to the Linnaean orders Accipitres, Picae, Anseres, Grallae, Gallinae, and Passeres. Van Grouw’s use of an eighteenth-century taxonomy “concerned only with outward structural appearances” allows her to indulge her fascination with convergent evolution, the process by which creatures that are only remotely related develop the same traits independently. For example, cranes, storks, and herons, neatly separated in modern classifications, have all developed long legs and long necks; hornbills and toucans, groups only distantly related to one other, have evolved huge bills. The Linnaean sequence lets van Grouw and her readers examine such similarities in appearance and adaptation unencumbered by the niceties of modern taxonomy. Not, of course, that van Grouw is anything less than familiar herself with the latest research, as her discussions in the text reveal; but it seems to me that she also feels an affinity for the older system, as concrete and solid as the bones she has embraced.

There is a lot going on under a bird’s skin, and van Grouw draws back the feathered veil layer by layer, showing birds with their skin removed, birds reduced to skeletons, bird skulls furnished with bills large and small, and bird feet with and without their scaly skin. Sepia-toned, cross-hatched, and finely detailed, her Mallards, Gentoo Penguins, and Great Spotted Woodpeckers, to name a few, do indeed have a nineteenth-century quality. (In an interview, van Grouw cites among her inspirations Thomas Eyton’s 1867 Osteologia Avium.) Pencil is used to delineate the edge and curve of bone, shadowing gives the muscles and feet substance, and a slight tilt of the skull makes the skeletons seem almost alive. The unclothed birds fly and swim and prance across the pages, much in the manner of the dead birds John James Audubon posed for his paintings. And like Audubon’s paintings, these illustrations embody a strong sense of design. The Northern Lapwing raises the bones that are its wings in sweeping diagonals; the skeleton of the Great Hornbill zigzags up from its perch, its great crescent bill stretching across the corner of the page.

The book is also full of drawings of parts of birds, mostly skulls and feet but also breastbones, wings, windpipes, and tongues. Skulls and feet are often shown in groups, revealing their striking range of sizes and shapes. It’s amazing how much easier it is to see the differences among the Darwin’s finches when you take away the feathers!

Similarly, drawings of one species in different stages of “undress,” such as this Barn Owl—its feathers, skin, and muscles removed one after the other to reveal the structure of its ear flap—function as visual lectures in ornithological biology.

Unexpectedly, domestic birds—waterfowl, fowl, and pigeons—are also unfeathered here. It turns out that the history of selective breeding over the centuries reveals a great deal about anatomical possibilities and limits. The description and drawing of the skull of the crested duck, an ornamental Mallard with a pouf on the top of its head, is heartbreaking: This bird has been bred for a genetic defect, a hole in its skull, which makes it look cute but often results in the growth of bone tendrils into the brain.

Rock Pigeons have also been bred into bizarre-looking types. This bird that so many birders love to hate is lavishly illustrated in a number of its most extreme domestic manifestations, including the African Owl, with its extremely small bill, and the Fantail, with its concave back. Van Grouw reminds us that Charles Darwin bred pigeons, the fancier the better, and found in them eloquent examples of mutability.

There is a surprising amount of text in The Unfeathered Bird, and it is worth the reading. Thanks to a background in taxidermy and seven years spent as curator of the ornithological collections at London’s Natural History Museum, Katrina van Grouw is conversant with what seems like every single bone in every single bird species, and she exhibits a notable talent for graceful explanations uncluttered by scientific jargon.

Here she is on the woodpecker’s tail:

Now a tail is not just a convenient bundle of feathers to lean on. It takes muscle power to function effectively as a brace, and large muscles need large bony surfaces to anchor to. The tail vertebrae of a woodpecker do not diminish in size toward the tip, and the final bone—called the pygostyle—is enormous, with a broad flattened underside for the muscles to really pull those tail feathers against the tree.

With the same appealing clarity, she explains why Anhingas have an extra bone in their neck, how hummingbirds’ wings are attached to their bodies by a ball and socket joint that allows them to fly like helicopters, and what nightjars have—a tapetum lucidum—that owls don’t that allows them to truly see in the dark.

The highly detailed descriptions of bones and eyelids and toe pads and mandibles never get boring, because all of those details are ultimately related to bird behavior. Toucans are able to nest in cramped tree cavities because their tails flip forward. Storm-petrels’ well-developed sense of smell allows them to return to their breeding sites at night. The occasionally overwhelming density of the materials would make this a hard book to read in one sitting, but it is a delightful one to read in pieces, a chapter or two a day.

It is hard to peruse The Unfeathered Bird without wondering about the story behind the book. Van Grouw made every drawing life-size on oversized paper from a specimen—all borrowed from museums or found already dead; no birds were harmed in the making of this book. As the author has related in interviews and on the book’s website, freshly salvaged carcasses were boiled and cleaned in van Grouw’s house by her husband, Hein van Grouw, who also wired the skeletons into lifelike poses; the couple’s joint endeavors apparently gave their home a very distinctive look. In the acknowledgments, the author thanks people around the world for gifts of carcasses and alludes to what must have been a memorable meal of bustard soup: I wish that she had recounted more such episodes in the book’s introduction, where they would have provided an engaging and illuminating context for the book's drawings.

My other quibble with this book is the index, which covers only the illustrations, a matter that is not explained. Both English names and scientific names are indexed, with English names entered under their first word, for example, “Parakeet Auklet” rather than “Auklet, Parakeet.” This means you need to know exactly which bird you are trying to look up, and its precise, full, and correct name. There is no bibliography or list of recommended sources, a source of regret for the reader: I like seeing where people get their expertise and inspiration. I did enjoy the Mallard skeletons that frame the index, as well as the European Robin skeleton at the end of the book, flat on its back, legs in the air, clearly dead. After so many skeletons in action, this was a fun touch.

I saw an errant rooster this morning at my favorite birding patch. Instead of walking past, I watched it. I thought about its stationary eyes and flexible neck, its footpads and its four toes, three in the front, one in back, all reasons why it was walking so daintily over the graveled parking lot with its head bobbing. This is what I got from The Unfeathered Bird, a new way of looking at birds, even the most common ones. An anatomical point of view gives us a deeper understanding of the behavior we observe in the field; it adds to the information in our field guides and handbooks. The Unfeathered Bird is not a reference book, nor is it entirely an art book, despite its exquisite drawings. Its failure to fit completely into a genre niche is its strength, making this a unique volume that beautifully presents difficult information in a manner that is easy to understand. While not a necessary purchase, it is a book that I think will add value to the birder’s library.

What lies beneath? In the case of The Unfeathered Bird, a world of skeletal pleasure.

 

- Donna Schulman is an academic librarian and birder. The author of more than 120 book reviews, she is the Book Review writer at 10,000 Birds. Schulman birds in New Jersey and, across two rivers, in Queens, New York, where she is preparing for this November’s New York Birders Conference and annual meeting of the New York State Ornithological Association.

 

Recommended citation:

Schulman, D. 2013. What Lies Beneath? [a review of The Unfeathered Bird, by Katrina van Grouw]. Birding 45(3):65.

Who You Callin' Amateur?

A review by Rick Wright

 

Bunch of Amateurs: A Search for the American Character, by Jack Hitt

Crown, 2012

280 pages, $26—Hardcover

In January 1917, Harold Gifford called in the pages of The Condor for the founding of a League for the Extermination of Amateur Ornithologists. The editors responded: Dr. Gifford

does not seem to realize that with the extermination of the amateur ornithologist, scientific ornithology is doomed to die out inside of one generation!

The notion that we birdwatchers contribute to science is a venerable one, running, in Mary Clench's felicitous phrase, "from the Pilgrims to the present." Historically, at least, there's a fair bit of truth to it: You may know the story of Eliot Howard, the manager of a steel plant in Britain and a fan of the Common Reed Bunting who, in 1920, introduced the concept of territoriality to English-speaking academic ornithology. And here in America, the great ornithological societies might never have survived their incunabula if not for dues-paying members drawn from the ranks of us dilettantes.

Jack Hitt's Bunch of Amateurs is an anecdotal exploration of the role of the amateur in American intellectual life, drawing for its vast range of examples on archeology, diplomacy, microbiology, robotics, anthropology, astronomy—and yes, ornithology. The test case in that last field, the one that matters to us, is the most celebrated of the century so far, the claimed rediscovery of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker almost a decade ago. Hitt—a contributing editor at The NYT Magazine, Harpers, and Lingua Franca—had just been let in on the secret by a slightly indiscreet friend inside The Nature Conservancy when, on that April day in 2005, the story 

leaked and blazed across the front pages of 459 newspapers.... The eminent director of the Cornell Labratory of Ornithology, in an ironical choice of metaphor, said "This is dead solid confirmed."

That untimely revelation denied Hitt his journalistic scoop. He overcame his disappointment, though, and quickly saw what too few have noticed even now: that "the ivory-bill came to represent issues much bigger than a single bird." The story was about much more than the factual matter of whether the big woodpecker survived or not; it became mythological,

a tale of professionals erecting a citadel of expert opinion around a new truth, with a sequel about a messy band of amateurs assaulting that fortress and tearing it brick by brick to the ground.

That's an admirably neat summary cast in enviably catchy language. But as we read on in the narrative of the Campephilus affair, it becomes clearer and clearer that the aperçu is too pithy by half. The mismatch between the tidiness of Hitt's categories and the messy individual realities of his subjects is a recurring problem in the book, but nowhere as obvious as it is here. What Hitt's simple heuristic paints as a battle pitting credentialed experts against ragtag hobbyists was far more complex, a series of sometimes discrete, sometimes overlapping struggles, with academics and amateurs, birders and bloggers, gurus and kooks coming down on both sides (all sides?) of the debate. 

Any distinction between "professionals" and "amateurs," in other words, makes it impossible to tell this story right.

Hitt also, here and occasionally in the book's other chapters, falls prey to a temptation he himself warns against at the beginning of his book: the identification of the amateur with the freak. Cornell's search team brought many well-known and eminently serious birders—amateurs—to the Big Woods, but they don't get much space on the page here. Instead, Hitt regales us with tales of a "perky" volunteer and a "ghost-chaser." Both anecdotes are uproariously funny (the one speaks mysteriously of her Ivorybill experience as if it were a state secret, the other "sees the bird quite a lot when she's alone"), but both are a little mean-spirited, as if Hitt were on a search not for the American character but for characters.

Hitt is absolutely right on, though, when he relaxes his focus on "amateurism" to consider the Ivorybill story from the point of view of narrative convention.

Every time, these expeditions seemed to be remakes of the exact same buddy flick. The courtly individual from the Yankee Ivy League college gets taken into the woods by the joshing redneck who knows the ground.... This repetitive quality to the stories—the experts, the fuzzy image, the pleas for belief and the collapse of the evidence, the Yankee intellectual and the Southern woodsman, the ultimate quest for land protection—meant that the search for the ivory-bill...was American mythology.

That is a powerful observation, one less about the status of a more or less extinct woodpecker than about the way in which the human mind creates truth. Hopes, dreams, and observations—for birders, for ornithologists, for amateurs and for professionals—make sense to us only when they fit into a comforting framework, only when they can be made to retell a story we've heard and told before. Maybe, as Hitt almost suggests, the problem with this latest (certainly not the last) Ivorybill affair was that the professionals started to tell an amateur story.

The categories don't work in this story—but they haven't worked in the North American bird world for decades now. In Harold Gifford's long-ago day, professional ornithologists and amateur ornithologists were engaged in much the same activities: shooting, skinning, and classifying. Nearly a century later, ornithology has become so specialized, so technical a discipline that it is nonsensical to speak, as Hitt does, of "amateurs" in that field. There are professional ornithologists, there are amateur birders, there are (even) professional birders; but, I would point out, there are no amateur ornithologists, unaffiliated, uncredentialed, uncertified dilettantes who while away the winter weekends in the garage, tinkering with their homemade electrophoresis kits.

But that doesn't mean that the editors of The Condor were entirely wrong, or that our long-lived pious belief in the contributions of the birder to science is always false. Properly trained bird banders with well-designed and well-defined projects, census-takers for the Breeding Bird Surveys, even careful Christmas counters and conscientious eBirders are all among the amateurs piling up the data for generations of professionals to come. It's not as sexy a story, but those and other enterprises like them just might tell us more about the American character than even the tale of the Ivorybill.     

 

Recommended citation:

Wright, R. 2013. Who You Callin' Amateur? [a review of Bunch of Amateurs: A Search for the American Character, by Jack Hitt]. Birding 45(2):67.

Let's Go Boiding

A review by Eric Salzman

Extinct Birds Boids 

by Ralph Steadman 

Bloomsbury, 2012 

240 pages, $50–hardcover

Feathered Dinosaurs: The Origin of Birds 

by John Long and Peter Schouten

Oxford UP, 2008

208 pages, $39.95–hardcover

ABA Sales / Buteo Books 12867

 

In early 2011, a documentary filmmaker by the name of Ceri Levy had the odd idea to ask Ralph Steadman—an artist better known for his social and political black-humor caricatures (think Hunter Thompson) than for his love of nature—to contribute to a multi-artist exhibition entitled Ghosts of Gone Birds. Steadman’s first effort, the Japanese Egret (sic), appears to have come straight out of a video game. But shortly thereafter, a stupendous “Great Extinct Auk” appeared, followed by a Giant Moa and a Choiseul Crested Pigeon—real gone birds indeed. And then, astonishingly enough, especially considering Steadman’s previous line of work, the “boids”—as he prefers to call them—continued to appear in a steady stream for the better part of a year. In the end, there were 100 sheets, enough to fill not only a whole room at the exhibition but an entire coffee-table art book from Bloomsbury.

A few of Steadman’s boids are not yet actually extinct, but most of them, including a shocking number from Hawaii, are indeed not around any longer to appreciate or to protest their high-handed treatment from the wicked pen of one of the great cartoonists of our time. The boids emerge from some unlikely ink splatters and then, like the canny politicians and wise guys Steadman loves to caricature, take on all sorts of petulant poses and angry airs, apparently defying their fate with panache.

As the series goes on and the scratches and blotches get bolder and more colorful, the Steadman boids became more and more fanciful, eventually including such specimens as the Quink, the Lousy Grudgian, the Mottled Splatwink, and the Lesser Peruvian Blue-beaked Blotswerve. No way any of these are going to go extinct, and, absurd as they might seem, I am not sure that they are any more remarkable than his interpretations of boids that used to be actual birds. I never thought I’d see the day when a book on extinction—birds, boids, what have you—would make me laugh out loud!

Steadman’s aviary includes the Orange-beaked One-Wing Jurassic and the White-winged Feathered Dinosaur, protoboids that are, being dinos, extinct by definition. I couldn’t find either of them in Feathered Dinosaurs, but the creatures painted there by Peter Schouten, although in a radically different and neo-realistic style, are hardly any less bizarre and colorful.

I have no idea how accurate or how fanciful these reconstructions are, but I suppose that Schouten’s realizations of that branch of the dinosaurian line that led to modern, er, boids are not that much more speculative than most dinosaur depictions. Most of these feathered dinos are relatively recent discoveries from China--some of them described from a mere few fragments of fossilized bone. That doesn’t seem to have discouraged Schouten and his collaborator, John Long, who give their reasons for imagining how these beasts might actually have looked and behaved.

Steadman’s boids are realized with splatters of ink, patches of color, and Steadman’s wicked wit. Schouten is, by contrast, meticulous. He took a couple of years to create pictures of active, colorful, predatory, displaying protobirds mucking about in the Late Jurassic or Cretaceous. The sequence of the illustrations suggests that, as time went on, the members of this dinosaur line became more and more bird-like, culminating not just in Archaeopteryx but also in Confuciusornis sanctus, the Sacred Confucius Bird.

By the end of the book, these creatures look like outtakes from a Helm or Princeton guide to some lost subcontinent. This volume has been out for a while, but it’s still available. You won’t laugh out loud, but it should evoke a gasp or two, and if you ever run into any of these guys, you might actually be able to use it as a field guide. Protoboiding, perhaps.

- Eric Salzman is a composer, writer, and birder, and the former review editor at Birding. Recordings of his work are on Labor Records/Naxos. His opera "Big Jim & the Small-time Investors" had a workshop in 2012 and is scheduled for production in 2014. He specializes in both birding and boiding from East Quogue, on the south shore of Eastern Long Island.

Recommended citation:

Salzman, E. 2013. Let's Go Boiding [a review of Extinct Boids, by Ralph Steadman, and of Feathered Dinosaurs, by John Long and Peter Schouten]. Birding 45(2):66.

A New Standard for the 'Stans

A review by Steve Rooke

Birds of Central Asia

by Raffael Ayé, Manuel Schweizer, and Tobias Roth

Princeton University Press, 2012

336 pages, $39.50—softcover

ABA Sales / Buteo Books 13583

 

Almost a quarter of a century after the breakup of the Soviet Union, tourists are flocking to the manmade and natural wonders of the Silk Road. Birders were especially quick to recognize Central Asia’s potential, and Kazakhstan has become a very popular destination in recent years. Up until now, though, we have been hampered by the lack of a good, up-to-date field guide. While V. E. Flint’s 1984 Birds of the USSR was thorough in its coverage, that book had its limitations, and so we made do with bits and pieces of other guides covering the periphery of the Central Asian region. The new Birds of Central Asia has been long anticipated, and its arrival in the Helm/Princeton series is much welcomed.

Covering the six “stans”—Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan—Birds of Central Asia features 618 species in a relatively slim volume. Constructed on what is now the almost standard field guide format, the book includes the usual introductory chapters, including a brief but useful introduction to the region’s geography and biogeography, illustrated with photos that, if nothing more, serve to demonstrate how incredibly varied and stunningly scenic Central Asia is. A short section on taxonomy and nomenclature details the authors’ departures from their primary authority in such matters, the third, 2003 edition of The Howard and Moore Complete Checklist. 

In the body of the book, the text for each species faces the relevant plate, which is as it should be. Almost every species has a small distribution map giving the reader a reasonably good idea of the bird’s range.

The appendices include a list of old, undocumented, or doubtful records; I am not sure why the Oriental Plover, well photographed in the north of Kazakhstan in 1990, is not included here or described in the main text. There is also a brief discussion of gull identification and of the molts and aging of large raptors.

Overall, Birds of Central Asia is a well-produced, compact guide that lives up to the standard set by Helm and Princeton field guides.

The plates are the first thing anyone looks at in a new field guide. A mix of painters and styles—13 artists are represented here—can compromise the visual unity of a field guide, but Birds of Central Asia maintains a reasonable uniformity across its 143 plates. The quality of the plates is generally very good; a significant number are taken over from other guides, and some readers will recognize them. 

There are a few shortcomings. Some species appear to be very washed out. The illustrations of the Saxaul Sparrow, for example, look very bleached, and do not really convey the smart, snappy appearance of that species, which is much more accurately depicted in the cover illustration. The Wryneck and some of the doves are also unusually pale. In other instances, some of the colors are too strong; look at the very bright red on the grebes, for instance.  

I was disappointed to see one of the region’s truly special endemics, the Pander's Ground Jay, represented by just a small (and out of scale) illustration, almost as if an afterthought. Dwarfed by a huge magpie on the same plate, this species, I suspect, was painted especially for the book and then added to a plate from another source. The text’s account of the ground jay is also disappointingly brief.  Although it does mention the very isolated and hard-to-see Kazakh race ilensis, nothing is said of the plumage differences between the nominate race and the darker, larger ilensis with its more extensive breast mark.  

On the first of the sparrow plates, the House Sparrow is much too bright, especially on the cheeks, which are actually quite gray. The female Zarudny’s Sparrow is, to my eye, also much too strongly marked; although the female of this species is patterned basically like the male (unlike her plain North African counterpart), she is much paler and more washed out than shown here. These are small points, though, in what is generally an excellent collection of illustrations.

These days, after the illustrations, it is the taxonomy of any new guide that is subjected to the greatest scrutiny. In an age of rapid and often radical change, this branch of our hobby inevitably poses challenges for authors—and for us mere birdwatchers as we try to keep up.

Birds of Central Asia follows Howard and Moore (2003), with some deviation where the authors found it appropriate. As has long been urged by Central Asian ornithologists, the migratory taxa once assigned to the House Sparrow have now been split as the Indian Sparrow. It is also pleasing to see the Central Asian counterpart of the Desert Sparrow finally accorded full species status and named in honor of the great Ukrainian ornithologist Nikolai Zarudny. This population, which occupies a very restricted range, is in desperate need of the further study that its elevation to species status should encourage.

The Asian Desert Warbler is split from its North African cousins, and the guide includes the recently rediscovered Large-billed Reed Warbler; that species’ breeding range has been placed in the southern portions of Central Asia, but it could be more widespread than currently believed, a good reason for birders to pay closer attention to all those Blyth’s Reed Warblers. The Booted, Sykes's, and Eastern Olivaceous Warblers are moved from Hippolais to Iduna, an innovation (following Howard and Moore) that may be harder for some of us to come to terms with. The Indian Golden Oriole, perhaps overlooked by some visitors in the past, is also listed as a full species. Sadly, there is no suggestion of a split for the regional population of the Crimson-winged Finch.

There are some "losses." Birders who have visited Central Asia in the past will discover that they have “lost” both the Turkestan Tit, placed within the Great Tit complex, and the delightful Yellow-breasted Tit, to be found among the Azure Tits. 

Anyone who has birded the semi-steppe deserts has seen many Lesser Short-toed Larks—or so we thought. Because Howard and Moore assigns the Central Asian taxa heinei and leucophaea not to that species but to the Asian Short-toed Lark, the Lesser does not appear in the book at all, a bit of a shock to those of us who have been entering it on our checklists for the past 20 years. At the same time, the guide’s taxonomic introduction tells us that (frustratingly) unpublished data suggest that heinei and leucophaea are in fact distinct from the Asian Short-toed Lark, either belonging to the Lesser Short-taoed Lark after all—or forming a separate species of their own. In their Birds of Kazakhstan (2007), Arend Wassink and Gerald Oreel call “the status of Asian Short-toed Lark in Kazakhstan…uncertain” and note that “recent trips to the supposed breeding range in Kazakhstan did not result in finding any”; until this complicated situation becomes clearer, it might have been better simply to leave us with the plain Lesser Short-toed Lark. 

Birds of Central Asia treats two populations of the Isabelline Shrike as separate species, the Turkestan and the Daurian Shrikes. Over the years, I have seen a bewildering array of Isabelline Shrike plumages in the region, some of which are sometimes referred to as karelini. This guide tells us that such birds are probably the products of hybridization between Turkestan and Red-backed Shrikes, an explanation that I feel oversimplifies the situation: I am not sure that anyone knows for sure the origins of karelini.  Similarly, the treatment of the large gray shrikes will raise a few eyebrows; here too, the book could be accused of simplifying the true picture.  

But simplification may, of course, be exactly what is needed in the complex and often confusing world of taxonomy, and perhaps this book is to be applauded for coming down off the fence on some issues—even if it does not happen to land on the side you are on. If nothing else, it will prompt debate.

Whatever your taxonomic views, there is no doubt that this is a valuable and much-needed book, one that very neatly fills a hole in the bibliography of Palearctic birding and has instantly become the standard guide to the region.

- Steve Rooke is the Managing Director of Sunbird, and leads tours for that company and for WINGS to Vietnam, Georgia, Cyprus, Central Asia, South Africa, and Ethiopia. Rooke has a wide range of interests outside of birding, not the least of which is cooking.

Recommended citation:

Rooke, S. 2013. A New Standard for the 'Stans [a review of Birds of Central Asia, by Raffael Ayé, Manuel Schweizer, and Tobias Roth]. Birding 45(2):65.

Dunne, Sibley, and Sutton: Hawks in Flight

Hawks in Flight, second edition

by Pete Dunne, David Sibley, and Clay Sutton

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012

335 pages, $26–hardcover

ABA Sales / Buteo Books 13648

 

Brian Sullivan reviews the new edition of a classic:

As a young hawk watcher at Cape May in the early 1990s, I thought the authors of Hawks in Flight were magicians. Pulling identifications out of thin air, they put names to raptors at the outermost limits of vision, recognizing patterns and keying in on subtleties of shape and flight style. At first I was incredulous: There was no way they could be getting every bird. But time after time, as distant hawks and falcons approached and finally showed their classic “field marks,” these guys were right. It wasn’t long before I was absorbing everything I could from them: It was the Cape May School of Bird Identification, and class was in session! I would never look at birds the same way again.

The first edition of Hawks in Flight was published in 1988. Modeled on Richard F. Porter and coauthors’ Flight Identification of European Raptors, this book for the first time showed North American raptors as birders could expect to see them in the field; even better, Hawks in Flight provided what was perhaps the first truly engaging writing on the topic, describing raptors in colorful and memorable phrases and boiling down field marks to their essential components. Hawks in Flight became my bible, and I went to church a lot, studying every word and line drawing. To this day, I still hear Pete Dunne’s words each time I see a Merlin dashing past like a Harley Davidson or an American Kestrel gliding by like a scooter.

It was with great excitement that I opened the long-awaited second edition of this masterly work, poring over the pages like a kid on Christmas morning. This new edition is a marked improvement visually, thanks to the addition of a suite of color photos illustrating each species (the original edition’s illustrations were all black and white). And by adding eleven range-restricted species to the twenty-three more widespread species treated in the first edition, the second now includes all the breeding raptors of North America north of Mexico, offering valuable information for the identification of a number of birds not often seen by most hawk watchers.

Digging deeper, I was happy to see that most of Pete Dunne’s witty and unique text has been retained. All of the species accounts have been edited and updated, sometimes at a slight cost to the original book’s distinctive style; though the revised accounts temper some of the original book’s more colorful statements—in some cases with good reason, in some cases probably not—the prose is still engaging, memorable, and informative, three qualities not often found together in bird books. Few writers can match Dunne’s cleverness in writing about birds, and I was glad to see that most of the lines that stuck with me twenty years ago are still there. I won’t be alone in that assessment: It’s common at hawk watches to hear observers reciting lines from the original Hawks in Flight.

David Sibley has contributed black and white line drawings to both editions; in another context, that medium might seem a bit dated, but in the case of hawk identification, colors and the intricacies of plumage are often less informative than are general patterns of dark and light or an unknown bird’s shape and flight style. Sibley’s drawings nearly always hit the mark, and I was glad to find that some that were slightly off in the first edition have been updated for this second: Compare, for example, his treatment of the upperparts of the juvenile Northern Goshawk, where the critical tawny mottling on the upperwing coverts, missing from the original edition, is now shown perfectly. Most species are illustrated in adult and juvenile plumages, and some are depicted in a range of morphs and geographic variations. Where these drawings excel is in communicating what the birds really look like in the field; with few exceptions, the shapes are right on, and Sibley’s rough vignettes showing species in direct comparison are certainly a highlight of the book.

The most obvious visual improvement in the new edition is the color photographs. A few full-frame portraits are interspersed throughout the book to add curb appeal, but the real contribution made by the new photo material is to the species accounts. Where the first edition tucked its black and white photos into the back of the book, the new edition ends each species account with a selection of color images depicting a goodly range of variation in shapes and flight postures. Each photo caption identifies the bird’s age, sex, and subspecies wherever possible and appropriate. This is a great upgrade overall, though the occasional off-center or oddly sized images and poor use of page space are perplexing.

Any book as full of information and detail as this will inevitably contain a few errors. There are a few typos throughout the text, and it’s not hard to find mistakes in the captions’ assignment of age and sex (the color photo of an adult Gyrfalcon on p. 147, for example, is erroneously labeled juvenile). Even the worst errors here are relatively minor, but they will lead the inexperienced reader to make mistakes.

Nonetheless, Hawks in Flight excels in teaching birders to identify raptors to the species level. While it understates some of the more complex challenges, the real key here is in any case getting the species right; across the entire range of the Red-tailed Hawk, to take a familiar example, 99% of birds of that species will be identifiable using the set of basic characters presented here to full satisfaction.

Where there is cause for significant complaint is in the book’s tendency to oversimplify complex topics such as geographic variation and aging. If we’ve learned anything in the twenty years since Hawks in Flight was first published, it’s that many birds don’t fit the mold. A simplified approach to complex matters can lead to misinformation and confusion. Taking as just one example the book’s discussion of a species I know well, the Red-tailed Hawk, we find misleading generalizations about subspecies; even though the reader is reminded that there are caveats, the treatment remains questionable. For instance, the subspecies Buteo jamaicensis “abietinus” is here designated the “Eastern Canadian Red-tailed Hawk,” even though this poorly understood population—currently lumped by most authors with B. j. borealis, the Eastern Red-tailed Hawk—was in fact described from the northern Canadian spruce-fir forest west to Alberta, not necessarily the eastern portion of it, and its scientific name is actually B. j. abieticola.

The mere mention of this population here is confusing, as are the statements justifying the book’s exclusion of two subspecies: “The Pacific Coast and Florida Red-tailed … share plumage characteristics that are fundamentally similar to the basic Eastern or light-morph Western Red-tailed Hawks.” In reality, these two subspecies are quite different from both Eastern and Western Red-tails, but little has been published about them, making them harder to deal with than the better-known subspecies.

The treatment of the Harlan’s Red-tailed Hawk, largely correct at its core, also introduces many inaccuracies. Our understanding of this taxon is still evolving, but statements such as “the back and upperparts are blackish (not brown)” are incorrect: Many are brown-backed, especially in summer. The barred outer primaries that are such a great field mark for juvenile Harlan’s are inaccurately described here as characteristic of adults—but all adult Red-tailed Hawks have similar variably patterned outer primaries. The book also mentions the “curious gray patterning on the flight feathers” of a light-morph adult Harlan’s (photo 21), but rather than pointing out that patterning as the excellent field mark that it is, the photo caption gives the impression that it is an anomaly. And oversimplified descriptions of tail patterns, such as “Westerns have banded tails and Easterns don’t,” are simply relics: We know today that many Westerns have plain tails that are identical to those of typical Easterns (as photo 7 plainly shows), and vice versa. Categorical statements to the contrary result in errors in the field, and tempt observers to assign birds to subspecies without a firm understanding of the complexity of the issue.

My concluding thoughts are simple. The second edition of Hawks in Flight stands alone in its ability to connect people with raptors. By boiling in-flight identification down to its essence, it helps birders learn to see field marks that lie beyond plumage details. It is not enough to say that every hawk watcher should have this book on his or her shelf; every birder should have this book at hand, as the skills and techniques found here can be applied to all types of birding, helping birders like me move toward more advanced levels of field identification.

Brian Sullivan

Carmel Valley, California

heraldpetrel@gmail.com

- Brian Sullivan is eBird Project Leader at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Photo Editor for BNA Online and for the ABA’s North American Birds, and co-author of the forthcoming Crossley ID Guide: Raptors. His research interests include migration, conservation, and field identification, especially of seabirds and raptors. 

Zickefoose: The Bluebird Effect

The Bluebird Effect 

by Julie Zickefoose

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012

355 pages, $28–hardcover

ABA Sales / Buteo Books # 13621

Here is a book whose graceful prose, charming illustrations, and exceptional design fully deserve every bit and byte of the praise that has been poured over it since its publication earlier this year. Julie Zickefoose’s writing is neat to the point of occasional elegance, and in the paintings, field sketches, and drawings that accompany her text, Zickefoose displays the full range of her graphic talent, from the witty to the touching, by way of many pictures that are, simply put, beautiful. Melissa Lotfy’s design makes it almost as much a pleasure to hold the book as to read it: I wish more bird books were square.

I expect birders to notice such things. But remarkably, The Bluebird Effect has broken out of ornitho-circles to be lauded just as loud in the popular press as well, from the Sunday papers to the book blog of a television talk show host so famous that she can get by with only one name. And all agree. This is a bird book for everyone, and (if I may be so crass) the spectacular sales figures at amazon.com suggest that that is precisely who’s reading it.

But one thing bothers me. Amid all this acclaim, well merited as it is, one vital question seems to have gone unasked by even the stillest and smallest voice. Yes, it’s a good book. But what is it about?

One of the sacred strands in the story of North American birding is the one that leads from the shotgun to the spotting scope. When we tell ourselves our history, we start with the Audubonian slaughter of the innocents, tarry briefly over Jonathan Dwight’s bird-in-the-hand bookplate, and rejoice in the oft-told triumph of Ludlow Griscom’s opera glass over firearmed skepticism. Birding, over the two centuries since Alexander Wilson roamed Cape May blasting away at everything feathered, has progressed—or at least so our narrative would have it—from an act of pursuit and possession to a discipline of observation and admiration. We’ve transcended the primitive materialism that needs to grasp everything and we’ve matured into a cooler, more abstract, more intellectual culture that can find satisfaction in contemplation.

Haven’t we?

Maybe not.

History doesn’t always proceed in a straight line, and progression isn’t always progress. The dialectical pendulum is swinging back at astonishing speed, and the past decade or so has seen a relaxation, even an incipient rejection, of the hands-off puritanism that guided our interactions with birds and other wild creatures in the days when I was a new birder. Historically and culturally, the American birding community has taken up again the childish ways we once so proudly put away.

If you happen to be among the more than one billion of earth’s human inhabitants who use Facebook, take an hour to run through your “friends” and their photos. Among mine, at least, images of birders quietly birding are significantly outnumbered by pictures of beaming souls clutching, touching, holding, cuddling, and grabbing birds. The mist net and the bal chatri trap have gone from researchers’ tools to hobbyists’ toys. Falconry is back in style, and the fashion industry’s slope back into feathers is growing slipperier every day.

The two dozen largely discrete essays that make up The Bluebird Effect are grouped by season, from “Spring Songbirds” to “Winter Musings”—a familiar organizational principle handed down from the very beginnings of nature writing. More subtle is the second chronological structure that Zickefoose layers on top of the calendrical. When the book begins, the author is “very young, barely able to reach over the woven wire fence” of a rural petting zoo; it ends, some decades later, with the death of Charlie, the Chestnut-fronted Macaw who Zickefoose feared might outlive her. There is, as the author herself notes, something of the memoir about this book, and we follow her from her days as a student and field worker into the years when painting, writing, and raising her own family have come to constitute what is to all appearances an immensely full and richly rewarding life.

But the book is still not about Zickefoose, and not even about the birds that populate the stories in each of the 25 chapters. It is instead about the meeting of the two; it is about intervention, the intentional, often literally hands-on interference in the lives and deaths of wild animals. The “bluebird effect,” the author explains, summarizes “the unknown consequences”—on birds and on people—“of a seemingly irrelevant action.” If a butterfly’s wing can raise a hurricane, then even so harmless and inadvertent an act as startling a hunting hawk may change the course of life for the hawk, for its prey, and for the human whose waving arms cost the raptor its meal.

This bluebird effect gives the book not only its title but also its third, most important, and perhaps unintended structural layer. Zickefoose’s stories proceed through the seasons of the calendar and through the years of her life, and they also move steadily along a scale of ever more intimate intervention into the lives of the birds, forcing the reader to confront important questions about the place of humans in nature—and about when enough is enough.

The Bluebird Effect begins with the author face to face with a “large tom turkey … feathers raised into an enormous sphere, his fleshy red, white, and blue wattles and doodads fully engorged.” Slightly intimidated, she lays her hand on the bird’s head and feels a “jolt of pure empathy …. something deep and primal, a realization that … there was someone in there … I could understand.” It ends with the painful account of life with her “raunchy, awful … tattered old” macaw. Falling somewhere between these extremes—the fleeting encounter with a barnyard bird and a tortured long-term relationship with a pet parrot that Zickefoose describes as a sort of interspecies marriage—are other interventions, some as innocent as throwing feathers into the air for nesting swallows, others as invasive as repeatedly removing chickadee nestlings from their box (surely with the appropriate permits) to serve as studio models. She even engages in predator and parasite control, microwaving infested nests and taking snakes for what I hope is not a euphemistic “ride down the road” when they come too close to her favored bird neighbors.

Zickefoose is a licensed bird rehabilitator, and many of the stories in The Bluebird Effect are about that particular form of interaction with wild birds. Undaunted by even the most demanding of wards, she raises hummingbirds, swifts, starlings, and more, giving them names, getting to know them as individuals, weeping over their corpses, and serving as what she unabashedly and without any apparent irony calls “their mother.” Such interventions are always strenuous and often heartbreaking, and to my view, almost never worth the terrific efforts Zickefoose writes so movingly about; I’d much prefer to see the considerable time and the considerable money required to keep a sparrow or an oriole alive in a cage for weeks or years devoted instead to preserving habitat or finding safe indoor homes for the feral cats whose attacks land so many birds on the author’s doorstep. Zickefoose disagrees: Intervention of this type might not matter so much to the birds, but, she says, the reward for us can be “a handful of human hearts connected in joy” as a rescued and healed Red-tailed Hawk soars overhead.

The most extreme interventions between humans and birds involve death, and the most extreme manifestation of death is extinction. Zickefoose fantasizes a sighting of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, and reports the real conversations, “absorbing and strangely sad,” she has held with those few living observers who actually saw the bird in its last years. She worries

about how modern endangered species management practices might handle the discovery of a relict population. The birds captured, one by one … taken into huge enclosures. Artificially inseminated. Their eggs placed in incubators … their chicks fed by lifelike puppets ….

Faced with a salvation like that, the birds would surely “fly away in a long, straight line … [from] the further workings of humanity,” a reaction the author imagines with sympathy.

There’s little can be done about the great woodpecker now, condemned a century ago to near-certain non-existence by collectors and pothunters. The guns still sound, though, aimed, legally, at wild birds from the Sandhill Crane to the Mourning Dove. Zickefoose has been one of the most outspokenly effective critics of the expansion of crane hunting in North America; the author admits here that the biological arguments are not clear-cut—it is at least possible that the increasing populations of this most abundant of the world’s cranes could bear a carefully managed “harvest”—but she argues that there is more to the issue than numbers. “I believe,” she writes, “that it is desirable to hold some species sacred.” And yet, she acknowledges, others can find the sacred in precisely that ultimate intervention, in killing and consuming the same birds that for many of us “awaken the untamed places in our hearts.”

The varieties of birderly experience and interaction described here are far from the detachment and intellectual distance that characterized our sport for most of the twentieth century. Again and again, Zickefoose asks herself not what she can see but rather what she can do: When a wren nest is too precariously perched, when a potential predator eyes a still-innocent fledgling, or when a greedy vulture gets a stomach ache, she intervenes. She picks and chooses when bestowing aid on her fellow creatures; she poisons night-herons, releases starlings into the Ohio wilds, and calls cowbirds “impostors.”

I would be surprised to see birders pick up their shotguns again, but it seems clear that watching is inexorably giving way to holding, contemplation to interaction. What that might mean for the birds is less clear, but in her lovely and important Bluebird Effect—and, no less, in the bluebird effect—Julie Zickefoose offers an unequivocally hopeful view of what it can mean for us. “By waving our arms at one hawk … we had intervened, and we were much the richer for it.” I hope she’s right.

Rick Wright

Bloomfield, New Jersey

rwright@aba.org 

                                                                                                                                                

Burton and Croxall, eds.: A Field Guide to the Wildlife of South Georgia

A Field Guide to the Wildlife of South Georgia

edited by Robert Burton and John Croxall

Princeton University Press, 2012

200 pages, $24.95–softcover

ABA Sales / Buteo Books #13701

A scant dozen years after its foundation at the turn of this century, WildGuides is a small and active non-profit publisher producing natural history guides covering Britain and the world. Like such other exciting European ventures as the wonderful Crossbill Guides, WildGuides had gone largely unnoticed in America, but that has changed: Earlier this year, the imprint was acquired by Princeton University Press, which now makes available North American editions of all of the WildGuides titles, including this newest, produced for the South Georgia Heritage Trust, whose conservation efforts are supported directly by the proceeds from this book.

“Cold, cloudy, wet, and windy”—the authors of this guide are never less than honest—South Georgia lies nearly a thousand miles east and south of the Falklands. Its starkly beautiful landscape of snowy mountains and spectacularly abundant wildlife makes it the most popular of the subantarctic islands for visiting birders and tourists, attracted by the hordes of breeding penguins and pinnipeds.

Impressive as the wildlife spectacle remains today, South Georgia is far from pristine. Human exploitation of the island’s seals for blubber and fur began just a decade after Cook first landed here, and the next century and a quarter saw the near extinction of the fur seal, a species that has happily rebounded. The great whales, too, were taken in almost unimaginable numbers, as those of us who first learned about South Georgia from Robert Cushman Murphy’s Logbook for Grace will recall. And the region’s seabirds are in serious decline, threatened by longline fishing and introduced predators. The South Georgia Heritage Trust’s commitment to habitat restoration includes the most extensive rat eradication program in history: Phase I of that program, concluded in March 2011, left the areas around King Edward Point and Grytviken rat-free for the first time in 200 years, and the goal is to eradicate introduced rodents from the entire island by 2015, eliminating, it is hoped, what has become serious predation on the eggs and young of the island’s birds.

Today’s visitors are unlikely to notice these problems, their attention drawn instead by what is still the island’s rich abundance of wildlife. With this guide in hand, the birder or interested tourist will be able to identify nearly every plant and animal she encounters.

As the most conspicuous and, for many of us, the most sought-after organisms on the island, the birds and mammals occupy 90 of the book’s 200 pages. Each species is illustrated by at least one photograph, facing a prose account that covers distribution, identification, voice, and behavior. No fewer than seven plumage stages are shown for the Wandering Albatross, and a taxonomic note informs us that the breeding bird of South Georgia is the Snowy Albatross, Diomedea [exulans] exulans = “chionoptera”. Rare, unusual, or especially appealing species are also accorded short illustrated essays, treating, for example, the breeding cycle of the King Penguin or territorial behavior in the Antarctic fur seal.

Birders who look beyond the spectacle of the island’s seagoing animal life may be surprised by how few non-seabirds South Georgia can claim. Two waterfowl species, the South Georgia Pintail and the Speckled Teal, are resident, as are some of the breeding Snowy Sheathbills; the endemic South Georgia Pipit, a frequent victim of introduced rats, is the island’s only breeding passerine.    

South Georgia’s small size, remoteness, and harsh climate make it possible for the guide to go beyond coverage of the island’s conspicuous “macrofauna.” A dozen insects, including six beetles and six flies, are described and depicted, as are a springtail, a spider, a bird tick, two earthworms, a snail, and the largest free-living copepod species in the world. These are the invertebrates most likely to be observed by the non-specialist, though the island hosts another 200 or so species, among them more than 70 mites and ticks.  

Plants, too, including 25 native herbaceous angiosperm species and 16 ferns and club mosses, are treated, as are the island’s commonest or most conspicuous liverworts, lichens, algae, and fungi.

Such breadth of coverage makes of this book a true guide to wildlife. Birders so fortunate as to visit South Georgia will, naturally, also pack such essential and more detailed identification resources as Steve Howell’s Petrels, Albatrosses, and Storm-Petrels, but this guide will open the eyes of even the most single-minded fan of the feathered to the richness and complexity of this most spectacular of the subantarctic islands.  

Rick Wright

Bloomfield, New Jersey

rwright@aba.org