The Quotable Birder

A sister-in-law, who is a birder, gave this last Christmas to me, who am not. (My life list might just graze three dozen species.) I've taken to dipping into it daily, expecting and usually finding pleasant surprises. Hardly any of the quoted are birders, and it is birds themselves, rather than birding, that compose the subject.The subject is inexhaustible, and it's hard to discern a rationale for what quotes have been included and what haven't. Maybe twenty percent of the quotations are memorable more for their arcane provenance (where on earth did he find *that*?) than their content, and not a few mention some bird or other only tangentially. But this comes to seem a strength of the collection, making it less predictable. And plenty of the quotes are either gems, or pointers to writers and speakers you might not know about and might just want to.Some quotes extend to a page or two, including several of Aesop's fables. Some are just a quip (David Letterman: "Fall is my favorite season in Los Angeles, watching the birds change color and fall from the trees.") or a couple lines of verse (Elizabeth Bishop: "A bird arranges / Two notes at right angles.") The voices belong to politicians and poets, comedians and soldiers, scientists and travellers, scriptures and satires. Together with the famous, the anonymous, and the formerly famous but now obscure (like Poe's onetime fiancee, who wrote her own version of "The Raven".)In the field, one rarely gets to watch most birds for long. In that sense, these 300 pages of brief glimpses mimic the birding experience very well. But how delightful it would be if one could view those birds in the bush from as many different angles as those from which this book approaches the whole family of feathered kind.