Birds are a problem. For me, personally, I mean. I’m interested in them but they’re too darn fast for me to identify, flitting around and never stopping long enough for me to train my binoculars on them. And as for identifying them by song, well, forget it. I’ll try to remember a call and then match it later online, but then none of the possible examples sound like the CRO-ACK! CRO-ACK! I remember hearing. Let’s put it this way: I can identify a robin, a pileated woodpecker and red-wing blackbird, and that’s about it.
If you are interested in birds yet, like me, are not cut out to be a birder, pick up Michael Edmonds’ new book Taking Flight. Edmonds, director of programs and outreach for the Wisconsin Historical Society, is a veteran birder, but this book isn’t a field guide. It combines Edmonds’ love of birds with his more historical bent, blending a little field adventure in each chapter with an academic (but not so very academic) take on the natural history of those things with feathers.
“Our predecessors in America’s heartland shared this landscape with nearly all of the same birds that we do but saw them through very different eyes,” writes Edmonds, “which prompted them to act in very different ways. This book describes the changing ways in which people have thought about and acted toward birds over the last 12,000 years.”
The book looks at the long history of Midwesterners' interactions with birds.
Edmonds begins with native peoples’ engagement with birds on a spiritual level, which we still see evidence of from the remaining bird effigy mounds right here in Madison. Because the Madison schools did a pretty good job covering the history of the mounds, at least, I knew more about them than I did about subsequent eras of white settlement. So I relished Edmonds chapter about the groundbreaking work of John James Audubon, who, in addition to creating visual documentation of the birds he found, was also one of the major 19th century nature writers, more detailed than Thoreau, and, Edmonds suggests, the great precursor to Muir.
Another chapter on how we name birds was enlightening, contrasting the Native American tendency to call birds after their “sounds, colors and conspicuous behaviors” — “crested one,” “bird-that-gets-himself-a-big-meal-of-seeds” — to the European habit of using more abstract terms — like “robin.”
Sadly, the book has to wrap up with “The Great Extermination,” in which a bird turns out to be no match against a human with a gun. If you don’t already know how, as Edmonds puts it, “in a single lifetime, bird species that had flourished in the Midwest for millennia were wiped from the face of the earth” this chapter alone should be required reading.
