The History Book Club discussion

This is a thread focused on the history and science of ornithology as well as bird watching.

The Peregrine

by J.A. Baker

Synopsis:

From autumn to spring, J.A. Baker set out to track the daily comings and goings of a pair of peregrine falcons across the flat fen lands of eastern England. He followed the birds obsessively, observing them in the air and on the ground, in pursuit of their prey, making a kill, eating, and at rest, activities he describes with an extraordinary fusion of precision and poetry. And as he continued his mysterious private quest, his sense of human self slowly dissolved, to be replaced with the alien and implacable consciousness of a hawk.

It is this extraordinary metamorphosis, magical and terrifying, that these beautifully written pages record.

Awards:

Duff Cooper Prize (1967)

Review:

Robert Macfarlane (author of an acclaimed trilogy of books about landscape and human thought) discusses the above book with FiveBooks:

Please tell us about The Peregrine.

The plot of this book is both easy and hard to summarise. At its simplest, it is a story about a man who is a loner and becomes obsessed with the peregrines that migrate over and then temporarily stay in his coastal English landscape.

They are hunters, and he hunts them in the sense that he follows them wherever they go. That’s about it. The book is the seasonal record of that hunt of hunters. The narrator watches them, he follows them, and eventually he is accepted by one of the peregrines to the degree that he can approach it.

In the climactic scene at the end of the book, the bird closes its eyes, even though it knows that Baker is there, watching it stopping watching him.

More complicatedly, the book is the distillation of 10 years of field journals kept by the author between 1955 and 1965 as he followed the peregrines of Essex, the county in the east of England where Baker lived.

It was during this period that the peregrines suffered a drastic fall in numbers because of the increasing use of pesticides and agrochemicals.

This was, of course, much the same period of time that prompted Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring – the great American protest against the overuse of agrochemicals. Baker’s book appeared in 1967. It can be understood, therefore, as a kind of elegy to a disappearing landscape, the Essex countryside, and to a disappearing species, the peregrines.

It’s also a shamed attempt to leave his own species – homo sapiens – and to almost become a bird by means of intense and metempsychotic concentration on the peregrines. In that sense it really is a misanthropic work, but one born of a kind of magical thinking.

Every day he gets up, looks for peregrines, observes peregrines, then goes to bed. How does he hold the interest of the reader?

It’s a deeply repetitive book, because birds are repetitive creatures and landscapes are repetitive things – seasonally, circadianly, hourly. If you want a forwards-driving plot, this is not the book for you. But again, as in Lopez, the style is so dynamic, just astonishingly kinetic and energy-filled. It’s beautiful – glitteringly full of light, angles and air.

It’s a book born of long acquaintance and powerful observation. Its intensity derives partly from this concentration, and partly from a different kind of concentration – the editorial distillation whereby it was produced from the hundreds of thousands of words of field journals that Baker had kept over that 10-year period. In a process about which we know almost nothing, he turned this bulging set of ornithological field journals into a 120-page prose poem

More:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Source: FiveBooks

Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding

by Scott Weidensaul (no photo)

Synopsis:

rom the moment Europeans arrived in North America, they were awestruck by a continent awash with birds' great flocks of wild pigeons, prairies teeming with grouse, woodlands alive with brilliantly colored songbirds. Of a Feather traces the colorful origins of American birding: the frontier ornithologists who collected eggs between border skirmishes; the society matrons who organized the first effective conservation movement; and the luminaries with checkered pasts, such as Alexander Wilson (a convicted blackmailer) and the endlessly self-mythologizing John James Audubon. Scott Weidensaul also recounts the explosive growth of modern birding that began when an awkward schoolteacher named Roger Tory Peterson published A Field Guide to the Birds in 1934. Today birding counts iPod-wearing teens and obsessive "listers" among its tens of millions of participants, making what was once an eccentric hobby into something so completely mainstream it's now (almost) cool. This compulsively readable popular history will surely find a roost on every birder's shelf.

Review:

This is an interesting history of birding and ornithology in the U.S. I5 covers the big names of naturalists like Audubon and Peterson as well as fascinating lesser known characters. It also discusses the varied approaches to the study of birds from strictly scientific ornithology to competitive listing, and the entire spectrum in between. It is an engaging and important read for people interested in birds, nature, and conservation.

Also on the topic of birding, the Kindle version of this book is currently on sale for $2.99:

Birding for the Curious by Nate Swick (no photo)

Eileen wrote: "Also on the topic of birding, the Kindle version of this book is currently on sale for $2.99:

Birding for the Curious by Nate Swick (no photo)"

It's also on sale on Apple. From what I hear, it is a great book for getting started with birding. Nate Swick hosts the American Birding Association's podcast, and he has a genuine passion for birds of all kinds.

by Nate Swick (no photo)

Douglass, that's good to know, thank you.

by Nate Swick (no photo)

Eileen, see the above - we normally add the book cover if available, the author's photo (nice to see what the author looks like), the word by and then the author's link. That way we can also utilize the powerful goodreads software across our entire site. Also - the white space on the right hand side of any thread would give the listing of all books properly mentioned or cited in any of the posts as well as a list of the authors in a separate listing. This listing also shows where else on our group site - the book or author has been discussed. Thank you so much for adding the book you did. In the case of the book you added, the author's photo was not available so we just simply added the words (no photo) at the end.

Douglass - thank you for your add as well.

Jennifer Ackerman, author of The Genius of Birds and Birds by the Shore has a new book out this week, The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think . The Genius of Birds was fascinating, so I am looking forward to reading this one too!

by Jennifer Ackerman

Thank you so much Douglass - I have always loved bird books.

What a wonderful post!

Douglass, please tell me more about The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman. It’s on my TBR List; should I move it up in the “cue”? Thank you.
Regards,
Andrea

by Jennifer Ackerman

Andrea wrote: "Douglass, please tell me more about The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman. It’s on my TBR List; should I move it up in the “cue”? Thank you.
Regards,
Andrea

There are a lot of facts that I did not know and that contradict popular beliefs. Chickadees keep track of thousands of caches and food locations, including where the food is located and how soon it will spoil. That's amazing considering that humans are supposed to be more intelligent, but we can't keep up with 20 things that are all in our refrigerator. Even the infamous dodo is actually a very intelligent animal. The sections about bird's social skills and ability to empathize and support each other really impacted how I think about them. I love watching birds, and this book gave me a lot of perspective into what is going on in their heads as I watch them behave.

by Jennifer Ackerman

Wow, Douglass, how interesting! This is a book I definitely need to read.
Regards,
Andrea

by Jennifer Ackerman