Watching Birds: Reflections on the Wing

""Maybe it's too many survey courses taken and taught. But [literature and birds] occupy the same habitat in my mind."" A professor of English at Salem State College (Mass.) and a recreational bird-watcher, Taylor offers 19 brief essays that illustrate the connection between the world of birding and that of words. It is literature that lures Taylor into bird-watching--Poe's raven, T.S. Eliot's catalogue of birds at Cape Ann, Thoreau's laughing loons, Wallace Stevens's blackbird. A pilgrimage to Selborne, England, provokes her to recall Gilbert White, an 18th-century vicar and author of Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, as ""the common ancestor of all amateur bird-watchers."" Seeing a skylark at Stonehenge sparks a comparison between birds' real songs and the messages that poets attribute to them. Taylor looks at birds in myth and legend, and at the practice of shooting songbirds (for food) in Italy. She gives an entertaining account of her attempts to identify birds in Kenya using an incomprehensible German-language guide. Though she can ramble and wax sentimental, her quiet prose comes to life when she discusses the writings of early 20th-century natural historian John Burroughs. Recounting a visit to his home in rural New York, Taylor embarks on a lively analysis of his work, arguing that, though the scrupulous author hated ""`nature fakers'... who force the natural world to do their artificial bidding,"" his own work was closer to that of an artist than a scientist. Discussing Burroughs's views of birding, Taylor finds the best medium to present her own comfortable, refreshing approach to observing birds. 20,000 first printing. (Sept.)