cover image Birds of the Sea, Shore, & Tundra

Birds of the Sea, Shore, & Tundra

Theodore Cross. Grove/Atlantic, $65 (0pp) ISBN 978-1-55584-385-4

``Whether one's career is law, business, publishing or hauling up the flag of revolution, watching, studying and photographing birds are superb ways of keeping one's mind off one's own mortality and staying very much alive.'' Economist-attorney-publisher Cross ( Black Capitalism ) marks 15 years of birdwatching in the High Arctic, the Central Pacific and the Gulf Coast in this appealing collection of some 120 of his color photographs of birds. Snowy egrets with fantastically flexible necks bend them backward to groom themselves; wild-eyed, fiercely tufted reddishsic egrets vigilantly guard their nests. A little tern shelters an even smaller, down-bedecked fledgling on a rocky shore; a fearsomely large snowy owl hovers over its young. Cross evokes a natural world of astounding variety and beauty that teems with seeming personalities, as an open-beaked yellow-billed stork suggests a meddlesome tourist's gawk, lacking only camera and Bermuda shorts. (Oct.)