Filling in for Anne Kilgannon this month, we have a delightful review written by Maria M. Ruth, on the book Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation, by Kyo Maclear.
What a pleasure to discover a perfect book and a perfect book for birders. What a rare pleasure to find such perfection by accident while idly browsing someone else’s bookshelves. The brightly colored title on the spine caught my eye: Birds Art Life. I had never heard of this book, published in 2017, nor the author, Kyo Maclear.
I slid the small, slim book off the shelf, read the table of contents and prologue, and felt that “must read this now” spark. Once I finished this natural-history memoir, I burned with “must recommend this to everyone now” fire. In just over two hundred pages and with seven black-and-white photographs (four of birds) and many delightfully quirky sketches, Kyo Maclear guides readers into a world where birds, art, and life are not separate nor separated by commas. These three subjects are woven together seamlessly, masterfully, beautifully.
Birds Art Life takes place over the course of a single year in and around the city of Toronto where Maclear lives with her husband and two sons. She is a writer in a creative lull and befriends a young musician who had recently worked through his own creative depression by taking up bird watching. The musician is a serious birder and becomes Maclear’s guide on their regular urban bird walks. This is not a romance but a story of two thoughtful human beings observing a small piece of the world while exploring the meaning of birds, art, and life.
Part of what makes this book perfect is its structure. It is divided into the four seasons. The chapters within each season follow the months and are centered around universal themes such as—love, cages, smallness, waiting, knowledge, faltering, lulls, roaming, regrets, questions, endings—and the birds she and the musician encounter on that month’s walk. In the hands of a less talented writer, this structure could seem forced and the themes as catch-alls for undisciplined musings, but Maclear is masterful. She seems to know exactly how many stories, ideas, thought pieces, quotations, sketches, and references to other writers’ and artists’ work are needed to make that chapter rich, engaging, thought provoking, and uniquely delightful for the reader. Where Maclear has anticipated her readers needed a break to ponder a story, paragraph, or set of rhetorical question, there is a visual break—white space or little bird-scratch marks like these:
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Another part of what makes this book perfect is Maclear’s writing style: spare yet generous, erudite yet conversational, philosophical and witty, free-wheeling yet restrained. She writes with a kind of shimmer, clarity, and humility missing from so much nature writing. This is a small, gentle book celebrating “small and significant” moments in daily life.
But what is this book about? I am at a loss here to tell you. The magic part of what makes this book perfect (for me) is that it seems to defy description. The short descriptions of its contents I have drafted are inadequate. My longer descriptions are inadequate as well. I have read Birds Art Life three times and what it is about seems to change with each reading—each reading enhances the next. Though I risk being dubbed a lazy wordsmith, I urge you to experience this book yourself. It is a subtly powerful book that is less about the “what” than the “how” of the practice of observation.
In many ways, reading Birds Art Life is like a perfect bird walk: you have a guide who sets a gentle pace and leads you on a meandering path into familiar and unfamiliar places. The birds are abundant and dazzling. And with every bird observed you learn how to observe the birds and the rest of the world more thoughtfully, deeply, joyously. Photo credit: Book cover art of Birds Art Life by Kyo Maclear.
