Dear Reader,

Below are a couple of bird lists, originally compiled for Misra’s year-end best-of mailing.  But they became top-heavy, and then sank to the bottom.  Read on if you dare.  

Part 1: Best bird-related books I've read in 2004:

 "The desert...its sky, its air, its flaming sunsets and dramatic landscapes...all this, yet a strange, mysterious more.  And it is of this that the Meadowlark sings.  Under his spell the load is always lighter..."

So begins my favorite bird book of all time, bar none. At first glance a humble guide to some of Smith's favorite desert birds, written at time when Arizona was still innocent of the abomination of Phoenix-style sprawl, this slim little book is actually a sly meditation on the meaning(s) of life as revealed through encounters with birds in the natural world.  It contains the most evocative, lyrical, and lifelike descriptions of birds' appearances and behaviors that I've ever read, including roadrunners' secret techniques for killing rattlesnakes, mockingbirds' attempts to imitate the sounds of human activities ("trying to hammer a nail in an empty room"), and the eerie calls of burrowing ('billy') owls.  "If I ever live alone in the desert again," Smith writes, "I want lots of 'billy owls' to live around me and to call in the night - just to assure me that the overpowering silence out there can be dealt with in a normal way."  Amen.

2) Life of the Woodpecker, by Alexander F. Skutch (1985), very beautifully illustrated by Dana Gardner.  Skutch died only a couple of years ago, one of the last of the great old naturalists, and his account of the lives of the world’s woodpeckers is a pleasure to read, packed full of detailed observations made over a lifetime. Skutch’s prose is charming in a way that’s hard to describe – it’s authoritative and humble at the same time, and occasionally stiff in a way that’s more old-fashioned than it is awkward.  Books of basic life history like this don’t really get published very often anymore.  Like Smith’s book, this one has a great opening line:  “A bird that uses its head as a hammer to drive a chisel-like bill into solid wood appears to jeopardize its brain.” 

3) The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, by James Tanner (1949).   The classic study of  this elusive (and now probably extinct) giant woodpecker in the wild, made only a few years before the last confirmed sightings.  Tanner spent years tracking and observing these birds, mapping the locations of their habitats and territories, assessing their needs for survival, and making recommendations for their conservation (which went unheeded).  Especially poignant is a detailed description of the behavior of a pair at a nest, logged with minute-by-minute accuracy.  The photograph of a mischievous, nearly-fledged nestling perching on Tanner’s hat is almost too much to bear.

4) Handbook of Birds of the World, Vol. 2: New World Vultures to Guineafowl (Josep del Hoyo et al, eds., 1992.)  I always find the term “handbook” misleading. The massive HBW, as ornithologists call it, isn’t something you could hold in one hand, much less use in the field.  It’s nothing less than an authoritative, multi-volume guide to every bird species on earth,with beautiful color plates for each bird, along with range maps and brief descriptions of their natural histories and conservation status.  Each taxonomic family (as in kingdom-phylum-class-order-family-genus-species) also receives an introductory chapter, generously illustrated with color photographs (the chapter on Secretarybirds alone is worth the price of admission – who doesn’t want to read about an eagle on stilts that stomps on snakes?).  The behavioral descriptions in this volume aren’t as full of life as in Brown & Amadon’s volume (see below) , but I think that’s just a side effect of the modern age, as poetry seems to be finishing its long goodbye to science these days.  The HBW is still a work in progress – I think the final volume may be set to come out next year, though they’re now stuck in the last, largest order of birds, the Passeriformes, which may take them more time and space than they’re anticipating.

5) Desolation Island, by Patrick O'Brian (197?).   If you haven’t picked up on O’Brian’s series of seafaring Aubrey/Maturin novels, now is the time to start.  “Master and Commander” was based on two of them, but the film (though it did feature footage of one of the places I worked in the Galapagos) woefully underrepresents the the triumph of historical fiction that O’Brian’s work is.  It’s essentially a 6,000-page novel of the Napoleonic Wars, issued in serial form over 20 years, starring the able-by-sea-but-witless-on-land Capt. Jack Aubrey and his friend Stephen Maturin, who’s like a combination of James Bond and Charles Darwin.  As they sail around the globe from one close shave to another, they’re always stopping in at strange ports of call where Stephen  is granted (or seizes) a chance to admire the local wildlife – and he is especially fond of birds.  In ‘Desolation Island,’ which takes place about a third of the way through the series, the crew of the HMS Leopard, commanded by Aubrey, are forced to spend months repairing their ship at a fictional but realistic sub-Antarctic island populated only by massive numbers of colonial seabirds, including giant petrels, albatrosses, and fulmars.  Stephen spends his days taking behavioral notes in the field and preparing specimens to be mounted and shipped back to England, should that possibility ever arise, but the other sailors, predictably, fall upon the juicy, just-hatched albatross chicks with abandon and stuff themselves for months until they can barely pull an oar, in a sort of early version of “Super Size Me.”  Anyway, as you can tell, I’m very fond of these stories, and the amount of research O’Brian must have done to write them is as staggering as his casual prose is entertaining.   Fortunately, he writes cunningly enough that you don’t have to begin at the beginning of the series to enjoy them.  Just dive in.  They’re the perfect literary meal – tasty and nutritious.   

6) Mind of the Raven, by Bernd Heinrich (1996).  A fascinating and nuanced exploration of animal intelligence that’s part behavioral science, part philosophy.  Heinrich, a retired ornithologist who taught at the University of Vermont, has lived and worked with ravens for many years, and has probably devoted more energy to understanding them than anyone alive.  There are behaviorists who think he’s gone off the deep end a bit with his insistence that ravens have “minds”, but I think he’s mining a rich vein. He’s looking for communion with the natural world, and he’s found it, without having to resort to new-age mushiness.  Also recommended is his previous book, Ravens in Winter, which describes his attempts to decipher a mysterious behavior he observes among a group of ravens in the dead of a Maine winter.  Be prepared to be impressed; this is a guy who thinks nothing of climbing a snow-covered tree at four in the morning when it’s five below zero.

7) Atlas of Breeding Birds of the Falkland Islands, by Robin W. and Anne Woods (1997).  Robin is one of my heroes.  Not only did he single-handedly spark my interest in birds when I worked as his assistant during the Falkland Johnny Rook survey of 1997, but his published works are models of clarity and accuracy.  This atlas, which he co-wrote with his wife, Anne, shows the distribution and abundance of all 59 breeding species of birds in the Falklands, from penguins to pipits, along with richly detailed life history information and conservation concerns for each one.  One of the best bird books ever written about the Falklands, possibly equalled only by his own “Guide to Birds of the Falkland Islands”, currently out of print but with a new edition in the works.  

8) Kea: Bird of Paradox, by Alan Bond and Judy Diamond (1998).  Alan Bond works at the University of Nebraska, where he’s designed ingenious computer-operated behavioral experiments for captive populations of several species of jays and Clark’s nutcrackers (which require an army of graduate students working around the clock to keep them alive).  His collaborations with Alan Kamil in researching avian cognition are groundbreaking and imaginative, and, though their published papers can be intimidatingly technical, they’ve shown the evolution of different kinds of cognitive ability (like spatial and social memory) within a lineage as linked to life history traits – in other words, they’ve shed light on how the minds of birds evolve new capabilities as needed in order for them to survive in different niches and environments.  Pretty badass stuff.  I can’t believe people get paid to do it.  They’ve even managed to get funding from the National Institutes of Health for this work, on the sort of thin premise that somehow it might relate to research on human neurological disorders at some vague point in the future.

But Bond’s heart, I think, lies as much in the field as it does in the lab, and this book is the result of research that he and his wife did for fun, with funding from National Geographic. It’s the entertaining and intriguing story of New Zealand’s incredibly weird mountain alpine parrots, the Keas, known for tearing apart cars and tents and generally being a very clever bunch of rascals.  To see Keas in the wild, Bond and Diamond didn’t have to look very hard – the birds aren’t very common, but they love rubbish dumps.  The couple set up shop in a little trailer next to a dump in Arthurs Pass National Park on New Zealand’s South Island and watched groups of Keas squabbling over choice bits of trash for weeks. In the process, they learned all kinds of things about the birds’ social interactions and hierarchies, including the remarkable role of play in their lives.  My favorite part of the book, though, is probably the introductory chapter, in which Bond evokes New Zealand as it was before humans arrived only a few centuries ago – a bizarre mammal-free land of birds, where giant ostrich-like grazing birds were devoured by giant eagles, while tiny flightless wrens scurried about like mice and flightless ground parrots dug burrows and chomped on ferns.  It’s a world of which Keas are a tiny remnant.  

9) Eagles, Hawks, and Falcons of the World , by Leslie Brown and Dean Amadon, 1968. Still the best work of its kind.  It contains beautiful descriptions of every known bird of prey, along with range maps and color plates by a multitude of artists, some of them merely competent, others truly excellent.  The variety of renderings of all the birds, however, is part of the fun – the portrait of a Laughing Falcon looks as if it might leap off the page, and the book has the best painting of a Striated Caracara that I’ve ever seen. The artist even had the courage to include the bulging yellow crop that often leads visitors to the Falklands to think that the birds are sick or injured!  Brown & Amadon kick-started raptor research in the US and worldwide, and their sense of wonder at the sheer variety of these birds shines through.  (For instance, they write of the weird Mountain Caracara of the southern Andes that “A less falcon-like raptor can hardly be imagined.”) They’re also quick to point out gaps in their knowledge of many species, and any scientific work that admits to not knowing something automatically scores points with me.  The cover image from “Thieves”, featuring African Polyhierax pygmy falcons perching in the thorny branches of an acacia, comes from a plate by A.E. Gilbert that was first published in this book.  

10) My Way to Ornithology (1985), and Another Penguin Summer (1972), by Olin Sewall Pettingill.   Two lovely and charming books given to me by a pioneer of American ornithology.  “My Way” is his rambling autobiography, “Another” is a book of wildlife photographs from the Falklands.  Sewall Pettingill was one of the founders of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (his Ornithology in Laboratory and Field textbook was standard in college classrooms for many years, in several editions). Among his many adventures, he sailed to the Falklands with his wife Eleanor in the mid-1950s to film penguins for Disney, where he marveled at an islander’s pet king penguin and broke his arm when he fell off a cliff while filming on Kidney island, near Port Stanley.   But he carried on anyway, and Eleanor’s book about their adventures and misadventures there, called “Penguin Summer,” is a wonderfully casual narrative of Falkland animal and human life at a time when islanders were still living in 19^th century conditions. (I was surprised to find a description, in her book, of a plucky young farmhand on New Island named Tony Felton.  I had met him in 1997 and remember him as a wickedly funny old man lighting hand-rolled cigarettes with a gold lighter in a kitchen on remote West Point island, while a gale howled outside.) 

Somehow, Sewall eventually wound up in an unremarkable nursing home in the suburban sprawl of Bedford, Texas, where I visited him a few times before he died in 2002. He was well into his eighties, and paintings of Rockhopper penguins filled the walls of his little room. I showed him some video I’d taken in the Falklands of ‘rockies’ squawking and squabbling at each other, and he got a little misty-eyed.   “Sounds like old times,” he said. Then, suddenly earnest, he looked me in the eye and said “I want to give you some advice.  When you’re out there in the field, working, you make sure to write everything down right then.  Write it, and write it while you’re in the enthusiasm of it. Because you’ll be amazed how quickly everything fades.”

The last time I visited him I don’t think he quite recognized me.  He seemed distracted, and said several times that he wished his children hadn’t put his books and journals in storage, because without them he couldn’t remember anything.  “When you get old,” he said, “your mind starts doing strange things.  It’s weird.” When I heard, a few months later, that he had died, I took down “Another Penguin Summer” and looked through it again, lingering over his photographs of Gentoo penguins pacing across windy beaches that I would visit twenty-five years later.  The image on the back cover of the book, though, is my favorite thing about it, and I hope someone displayed it at Sewall’s funeral.    Taken by Eleanor, it shows him looking dapper and distinguished in a knit cap and custom-made cold-weather gear, sitting on a rocky sub-antarctic shore and admiring a group of King penguins who are peering at him from only a few feet away.   Below, a caption reads: “Olin Sewall Pettingill, Jr., meets the welcoming committee.”  If there’s an afterlife, or a variety of after-lives, I hope this is the one that was waiting for him. 

2) Spectacled Owl, near Mindo, Ecuador.  Midday.  Perched in a tree just off a gravel road through second-growth cloud forest.  Nearby, a giant earthworm lay dead in the road, as long and thick as a whiffle bat. 

3) Bald Eagle, over Lake Rabun, Georgia.  Far away, but unmistakable, the white head and tail a dead giveaway.  In a time when wild landscapes and creatures are generally under assault, it’s nice to see these coming back to places like the southeastern US.  My father had never seen one before, and it was a delight to show this one to him.

4) Galapagos Mockingbird, Espumilla Beach, Santiago island.  Tapping on the roof of my tent every morning.  They’re like brainier, brawnier versions of their American cousins.  Friendly, fierce, curious, and tenacious. 

4.5) New Zealand Falcon, in the Dart river valley, on New Zealand's South Island.  I was hiking on a several-day trip with my father, and it had been raining all day.  We spotted this one, blueish-grey against the deep green of the beech trees (the same sort that used to cover Antarctica, long ago),  and watched with delight as it nailed a non-native chaffinch for its tea.  One of the few victories, in New Zealand, of a native species over an alien. New Zealand falcons are in the genus Falco, along with our familiar peregrines and merlins and kestrels, but there's something a little weirder and more primitive about them - the longer legs, the chunkier body.  My hat's off to these uncommon birds for surviving the ecological disaster that humans have created in their home.  At least so far.

5) Galapagos Doves, six, in a dry creek bed near "Landslide" Territory, Santiago island.  Perched in the graceful branches of a poison apple tree.  One author described this species as “a rather dumpy pigeon,” and its call as “a soft, annoying cooing.” I’d like to kick his ass. They’re the loveliest little doves I’ve ever seen, with a little china-blue eye ring and russety-brown on the wings.  And so tame you could almost touch them.     

6) Galapagos Penguin, swimming, Sulivan Bay, Santiago island.  We were both swimming, the penguin and me.   I watched him veer to avoid a giant sea turtle floating lazily in the clear, blue water.

7) Monk Parakeets, outside Bouldin Creek post office (78704), Austin.  I’m still amazed that so few people know that these bright green, noisy, social birds live here in town in large numbers (there are also feral groups of them in New York and Chicago).  There was a group of eight sitting on a power line just outside the post office, chattering to each other and catching the sun.   I pointed them out to a fellow postal customer, and she was astonished.  When I drove out of the parking lot she was still standing just outside the entrance, looking up.

8)  Common Ravens, Pacific Northwest.  Why is it that the silhouette of one these birds always makes my scalp tingle?  Bernd Heinrich’s books have something to do with it, but I remember feeling the same way when I first saw them in the Arctic back in 1998.  When we’re in the tour van I always feel compelled to point out every one I see, which, after a while, starts to drive everybody crazy.

9)  Carunculated Caracaras, on the slopes of the volcano of Antisana, Ecuador.  On a day trip from Quito, in a minivan crammed with Ecuadorans out for a Sunday drive to the cool, misty, eerie world of the Paramo, elevation 14,000 feet.  The terrain looked incredibly like the Falklands or the English moors up there, despite being thousands of miles away and resting almost squarely on the equator.  Like their close Falkland relatives the Striated Caracaras, these Carunculateds were hiding behind tussocks of tall grass or walking around scratching in the loose turf like chickens.  They were sacred to the Inca, like the condors, and it’s easy to see why – they just don’t look or behave like anything else.  They seem special, somehow – fancy, but also curious and practical.  Local folklore alleges that if you breed one with a chicken, you can get a peerless fighting cock.  When we stopped at the side of the road to take pictures, I found the body of one in a ditch, its flight feathers sheared off as if with scissors – maybe the victim of a barnyard experiment gone wrong.    There’s apparently a folk song about the caracaras, the first line of which was familiar to everyone: “Alza la pata, curiquinge” (“Lift your leg, caracara”). A dance that went with it seemed to be an Inca version of the hokey-pokey.

10) Audubon's Shearwaters (flock), Santiago Island, Galapagos.  How could I not include our namesake?  Seen from the shore on a hot, still afternoon, calling to each other in squeaky little voices over calm seas while a Magnificent Frigatebird wheeled overhead.  There were marine iguanas sunning themselves on the lava and little white-tipped reef sharks feeding in the shallows, the sun shining through their tails and dorsal fins, poking out of the water.

And finally, an endorsement:

I can't do all this talking about birds without a shout out to the San Antonio Zoo.
It's my favorite wildlife park in the US, despite the fact that it's housed in a relatively humble municipal-zoo setting.  No multi-million-dollar gorilla pavilions, no rides.  But in addition to the traditional lions and tigers and bears (and an okapi!), they have a truly massive collection of birds, nearly all of which seem healthy and happy and well cared-for.  It’s the best showcase I’ve ever seen for the shocking diversity of bird life, from Cassowaries and Secretarybirds to Quetzals, Pygmy Falcons and Andean Condors.  Sunbitterns, Prairie-Chickens, Hornbills, and Hamerkops to Bleeding-Heart Pigeons.  Ruddy-headed Geese and Hyacinth Macaws to Great Argus Pheasants.  Oh, and a Tawny Frogmouth, too.  If you ever come to visit me, I'm going to at least threaten to take you there.

- JM Jan 2005