The Bird with Flaming Red Feet: Seasons with an Uncommonly Common Seabird

Nature writer Ruth (A Sideways Look at Clouds) delivers a charming natural history of the Pigeon Guillemot, a seabird found along the Pacific coast from Alaska to Southern California. Despite their abundance, they aren’t widely known, Ruth explains, blaming their “misleading and awkwardly unpronounceable name” (they’re auks, not pigeons, and Guillemot, though it looks French, is pronounced GILL-uh-mott). After a friend convinced her to volunteer to survey a guillemot colony in Puget Sound, she became captivated by the playful creatures, whose “fire-engine red webbed feet dangle comically beneath them like loose rudders.” Ruth details the bird’s behaviors, including its tendency to stay within 15 miles from the shore in a “just right” zone of not too hot or too cold water; courtship rituals (the male paddles around a female, dipping his head in and out of the water, seemingly “head over heels”); and vocalizations (they have more than a dozen “trills, whistles, and screams”). Elsewhere, she celebrates the network of volunteers whose regular counts of the birds help scientists understand the health of Puget Sound at large. Though at times the author goes overboard with detail, including dense descriptions of museum collections and studies to distinguish the Pigeon Guillemot from other species, her enthusiasm is contagious. This is a treat for bird lovers. Photos. (Apr.)