Dare to Bird: Exploring the Joy and Healing Power of Birds

Ecologist Hafting debuts with an appealing celebration of birding’s many pleasures. Reflecting on what the hobby has meant to her, she discusses how spending time in the presence of birds helps her feel less lonely and how “the heavy burden of life and grief lightens just a little” when she listens to birdsong. Hafting’s parents feature heavily in her recollections, as when she credits her father for “instilling the love of nature and birds in me” and tenderly describes the joy that watching pelicans and yellow-headed blackbirds brought to Hafting’s ailing mother during a final birding trip before she died of cancer. Hafting, who is biracial, emphasizes the need for greater diversity in birding and discusses how she started a young birders program in part to provide an inclusive space for birders of color to explore their passion. There are some mildly amusing avian facts sprinkled throughout (hummingbirds’ hearts “can beat up to 1,200 time per minute” while in flight; burrowing owls make their homes in holes dug by prairie dogs or ground squirrels), but the main draw is Hafting’s eye-catching photos, which capture a bald eagle in flight, the male greater sage-grouse’s mating dance, and hundreds of nesting common murres on a Newfoundland cliff face. It’s a deeply personal love letter to birding. Photos. (June)