Books: "The Book Of Birds" By Macfarlane & Morris

 

The Book Of Birds: A Field Guide to Wonder and Loss

By Robert Macfarlane & Jackie Morris

Norton; hardcover, 384 pages; $35.00

Robert Macfarlane is internationally renowned for his writings on nature, people, and place, and he has collaborated with the artist Jackie Morris on the best-selling books of nature poetry, and art, The Lost Worlds and The Lost Spells. Macfarlane's best-selling books include Underland, Landmarks, The Old Ways, The Wild Places, and Mountains of the Mind. These have been translated into over 30 languages, won many prizes around the world, and have been adapted for film, music, theater, radio, and dance.

MacFarlane and Morris' new collaboration is The Book Of Birds: A Field Guide to Wonder and Loss, a veritable encyclopedia of endangered birds, and how to not just identify birds, but how to identify with them.

A thinning in the skies is underway, as almost 50 percent of bird species are in decline around the world. Dawns and springs are quieter, while the air is emptier, and there is a loss of unimaginable abundance.

At the core of this book is the 'Seven Wonders' that create the everyday miracle they simply call 'Bird,' and they are Nest, Egg, Beak, Song, Feather, Flight, and Migration. They are grouped in seven groups of seven, and they convey the unique spirit of nearly fifty once-common species.

These range from Avocat to Yellowhammer, Kestrel to Kingfisher, and Skylark to Nightingale, and, as the authors write, "all of whom are, or have recently been, on a so-called 'Red List' or 'Amber List' of conservation concern. Each is beginning to glitch, to struggle, to sputter. Each is slipping from our cities, fields, hills, rivers, forests, coasts, and seas. Each has somewhere started the slow slide towards the absolute dark of extinction."

Macfarlane, who writes his essays with a delicacy in a very vivid style, describes each bird's habits and habitats, their patterns of flight and patterns of song, how they hunt or fish or scavenge or gather, how they nest and raise their chicks, the myths that go with them, the threats that shadow them, and how their lives intersect with ours.

Along with those sterling words is Morris's enchanting artwork, painted from life in watercolor and gold leaf, and animated with a wonderful attention to detail. Their work together provides an incredible appreciation for birds.

In this excerpt from the part on Nest, Macfarlane writes: To nest is to trust. To trust the earth to nourish the root that bears the trunk that grows the branch that makes the crook that holds the weave of moss and twig that forms the nest that cups - pressed beneath a warm and beating chest - the egg.

Nest is secrecy. Nest is rest. Nest is sanctuary, fastness, absence of fear. Nest is bowl, sphere, burrow, hole or cradle. Nest is white stork's bristling cauldron of sticks and soil on a church's steeple. Nest is skylark's hollow in a wild-flower meadow, or lapwing's scrape in a pylon's shadow. Nest happens far from human eyes, and Nest lives hard by people. Nest is blessed.

Nest is ingenuity, intricacy, improvisation. Nest is wren's ball - pure cocoon. Nest is starling's mess; all twigs and yarn, untidy as a teenager's room. Nest is four glowing blue robin eggs tucked in a boot in the daytime dusk of a cobwebbed barn. Nest is bowerbird's bling-and-dazzle. Nest is flamingo's urn of sun-burned Clay. Nest is gyrfalcon eyrie used yearly since long before the Roman Empire faded away. Nest is three swallow chicks packed snug in a cup of mud above a farmhouse door.