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Soaring with Fidel
Reviewed by Mark S. Garland

It’s a frequently used literary device in the field of nature writing: follow some natural feature, species, or phenomenon and write not just about the nominal subject, but also about personal experiences and people met along the way. John McPhee has made this an art form, and other writers follow the pattern for good reason. This formula works, and the interwoven stories of nature and humans make for a good read.

A newly published book in this genre is Soaring with Fidel by David Gessner. It’s a fun read. In 2004, Gessner moved from Cape Cod, where he had studied and written about Ospreys (his Return of the Osprey was published in 2002), to a new home near the coast of North Carolina. A mix of homesickness and migratory unrest triggers a visit to Cape Cod in late summer, and there he concocts a plan to follow his favorite birds in migration. He has recently learned of research suggesting that most Ospreys migrate over Cuba, and Gessner has enough left-wing politics and counter-culture sentiments within his persona to give great appeal to an illicit visit to Cuba.

With little preparation and a one-week car rental, he begins his odyssey in the US. Early on he learns that the BBC has sent a TV star, producers, scientists, and film crews to the US to also follow Osprey migration, a high-tech effort focused on particular birds fitted with satellite transmitters. Gessner views the BBC as his competition, and he relishes comparing his unfunded, low-tech, and haphazard journey with that of the deep-pocketed media giant.

For a week he meanders down the east coast, watching Ospreys where he can find them and meeting up with Osprey experts and enthusiasts all along the way, sometimes by appointment but other times by happy accident. There’s a very odd gathering of Internet Osprey fanciers on Long Island that he attends, and he chronicles enjoyable visits to Hawk Mountain and Cape May. At Hawk Mountain he spends time with one of the bosses, Keith Bildstein, the sanctuary’s director of conservation science. During his brief visit to Cape May, however, he is drawn to the youthful enthusiasm of the seasonal naturalists and counters. By the time he leaves Cape May, he’s only got a little time left on his rental car before he must return it in North Carolina, yet he still wants to visit the Outer Banks. One impulsive decision leads to another and he blows a bunch of money by returning the car late. Lucky for Gessner he has also hooked up with a generous friend along the way.

With his benefactor’s check deposited, Gessners arranges his trip to Cuba, where he has great experiences watching Ospreys migrate over a peak called La Gran Piedra. His journey ends with his return to the US – for a while. But come winter his migratory unrest returns, and the next thing we know, Gessner and an old friend are watching Ospreys in Venezuela. He returns home, and when March comes he’s off to Florida for yet more Osprey-watching. The book finally ends, but you’re left with the feeling that Gessner is still out there impulsively chasing Ospreys around the globe.

Gessner is a likeable fellow and an entertaining writer whose prose brings you right into his life. It’s fun to travel along with him. There are factual errors, however, so don’t take everything too literally. I only caught errors about the places I know, but these leave me wondering how much carelessness and/or poetic license infuses the rest of the text. He even manages to misspell Pete Dunne’s name repeatedly (but also to get it right a few times). But in the end, it doesn’t really matter. This isn’t a book about facts, it’s a book about feelings, and Gessner’s passion is delightful to observe and, vicariously, to share.

Gessner, David. Soaring with Fidel: An Osprey Odyssey from Cape Cod to Cuba and Beyond. Boston, Beacon Press, 2007. 289 pages, $24.95 cloth. ISBN-13: 978-0-8070-8578-3; ISBN-10: 0-8070-8578-2.

Why Don't Woodpeckers Get Headaches: And Other Bird Questions You Know You Want To Ask
Reviewed by Mark S. Garland

If you ever listen to Public Radio, you’re familiar with the “Car Talk Guys,” the jolly hosts of the “Car Talk” program who actually answer questions about cars while joshing and joking with the callers. Mike O’Connor takes the same approach with a newspaper column, “Ask the Bird Folks,” that runs in a local newspaper published on his home turf, Cape Cod. This book, Why Don’t Woodpeckers Get Headaches, is a collection of those questions along with O’Connor’s responses.

The articles seem to have been selected based on two criteria: genuinely useful information that the casual birder will find interesting, and questions that are downright bizarre. The results are mixed. Don’t assume you’ll love the book just because you’re a “Car Talk” fan. This brand of goofy humor works better in the spontaneous medium of radio than in print, for one thing, and O’Connor’s humor comes with a bit of an unfriendly bite at times. I found a few comments amusing, but there were no “laugh out loud” moments for me. Still, it is fun to ponder questions like the one posed in the title and it is amazing to learn that someone could ask the question, apparently in all seriousness, “Are flamingos just an odd bird that zoos have created?”

O’Connor runs a retail store for bird watchers and sells lots of bird seed, so many questions revolve around the art and science of bird feeding. Once a salesman always a salesman, and there are times when O’Connor is clearly pitching sales. But after you get past the promotional paragraphs, snippy insults, and silly jokes, there is good, sound information that can help the casual backyard bird feeder.

O’Connor also tackles many questions that are very familiar to me and any other person who has worked for an Audubon Society, nature center, or in any other capacity that labels one as a “bird expert” to the non-birding world. We all develop our stock answers to these questions, and it’s interesting to see his take on such perennial favorites as, “Why do birds stand on one leg?”, “Why are there Robins here in the winter?”, “Will the mother bird still feed her chicks if I touch them?”, “Will birds get sick eating rice thrown at weddings?”, “How fast do birds fly?”, “What happened to the birds that were coming to my feeders?”, “Will my hummingbird feeder keep the birds from migrating?”, “Why is a woodpecker pecking on metal?”, and of course, the age-old favorite, “How do I keep squirrels away from my bird feeders?”

If these are questions about which you ponder, the answers are here. If you need a little book costing $10 as a gift for someone who enjoys feeding birds, you could do worse than picking up this book. But Why Don’t Woodpeckers Get Headaches isn’t meant to be taken seriously, so for goodness sakes let’s not take it seriously here.

O’Connor, Mike. Why Don’t Woodpeckers Get Headaches: And Other Bird Questions You Know You Want to Ask. Boston, Beacon Press, 2007. 212 pages, $9.95 paper. ISBN 13: 978-0-8070-8574-5; ISBN 10: 0-8070-8574-X.

Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place
Review by Mark S. Garland

Robert Michael Pyle is one of the most celebrated contemporary nature writers. He is also a noted conservationist, having founded the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, the father of modern-day butterfly watching, and author of both field guides and elegant nonfiction. He’s also a pretty good birder.

Early in his adult life Pyle chose to seek out a quiet, rural setting where he could settle in for life. He chose an obscure little town in southwestern Washington State, Gray’s River. His book Wintergreen: Rambles in a Ravaged Land, published two decades ago, chronicled a young man’s enthusiasm for his chosen place. That book was awarded the prestigious Borroughs award, given to a single book annually as the year’s best natural history book.

Sky Time in Gray’s River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place, is another look at the same region, but it’s by no means a repeat of Wintergreen. Pyle is an older man now and his relationship with his home turf is far more mature, far deeper and vastly more textured. This book is an elegant love letter to the land and its many components, the birds and wildflowers, his house and its garden (including the beloved compost pile), and the neighborhood community. The book follows the seasons, its twelve chapters mostly connected directly to the months of the year. We learn of this famous man’s fondness for his rather ordinary and un-famous standing within his community. We learn how he welcomes spiders into the shower and bees into a hole in the house’s wall, which leads to the curious concept of a buzzing bookshelf. The history of his house, the nearby covered bridge, and the Gray’s River Grange are all included. We even learn (and some birders doubtless cringe) that for two consecutive winters a Rustic Bunting visited the homestead, but Pyle’s need for quiet and semi-anonymity led him to share this rare bird sighting with just a select few.

It all may seem like mundane details about a place that most of us don’t know, will never visit, and don’t really care about. On the surface this is true. Yet this is luxurious prose, the most carefully crafted work of Pyle’s career. It’s an immensely pleasing book to read, but it’s not one to hurry through. Each page is as luscious as a delectable dessert. You wouldn’t want to gobble down a dozen desserts in a row; you shouldn’t read more than a chapter at a time of Sky Time in Gray’s River. Take the time to savor each carefully chosen adjective, let the pictures painted by Pyle’s words form fully in the mind’s eye. If you’re like me, you’ll find yourself yearning for your own bucolic get-away, a quiet and peaceful little village where life still proceeds at the pace of an earlier time. Few such places still exist, and in truth some of Pyle’s neighbors don’t find Gray’s River to be so idyllic. The enduring value of Sky Time is the lesson of perspective. As birders, as naturalists, we are privileged to find natural wonder every place we look. Pyle appears to take this sensibility to every day of his life, proving that paradise is perhaps something more internal than external, as long as we’ve left a little bit of nature intact.

Pyle, Robert Michael. Sky Time in Gray’s River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007. 256 pages, $20.00 cloth. ISBN-10: 039582821X; ISBN-13:978-0395828212.