By Anne Kilgannon
The early darkness and steady rain, not to mention that unwelcome life form known as COVID-19, has many of us sheltering inside more during this season, but the upside is it’s the time of year for candles and hearth-fires and the giving and receiving of gifts. Time to ponder our lists! I have two suggestions and always welcome your recommendations for my own reading.
I consider myself a beginning student of birding and birdlife, and so was thrilled and captivated by David Allen Sibley’s new book, What It’s Like to Be a Bird, when I received it as a birthday present. This oversized book is so packed with birdlore and answers to scientific puzzles about birds—their physiology, behaviors, quirks and plain astounding facts—that any amount of browsing its pages would draw in readers whether they have ever given birds a thought or are longtime experts in the field. If you have someone on your gifting list you want to encourage to join you in your favorite pursuit, this book is a superb entry point.
The writing is full of interest and organized in fact checklists as well as bird by bird, allowing readers to hunt and peck their way as fancy dictates; Sibley himself invites just this sort of perusal. But as fascinating as the writing is, the words are secondary to the exquisite watercolors filling every page. Sibley is rightfully acclaimed as a master bird artist and here he brings us close, so close you feel you can touch each bird. The pages are large because he wanted to show the birds life-size, even the biggest ones. Here you can get right up to a pair of dancing Sandhill Cranes and examine the vivid markings around their eyes, or turn to the pages on wild turkeys, or ravens, or the Greater Roadrunner to see them looking back at you…you’ve never been that close before!
Sibley brings us each bird and both tells us and shows us what is special and illuminating about each species, and also what is universally “bird” so that we can learn where and how it fits into the larger taxonomy. This is a book to while away a day or every day as there is so much to discover within its covers. I can’t praise it enough.
Another book I’ll be pressing on family and friends this year is rooted in a different sense of wonder. And urgency. I am highly recommending everyone read David Attenborough’s A Life on Our Planet, with its powerful and compelling subtitle My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future. If you happened to see his documentary of the same name on Netflix, you’ll recognize his message and plea. This new book has an even more in-depth discussion of what we humans have wrought in the world and what we can do to change course to save the Earth and ourselves from disaster.
Attenborough reflects on his extraordinary life’s work traveling the world and creating nature documentaries that introduced many of us to creatures and places we would never have experienced otherwise. While certainly exotic, his presentations are also intimate and full of affection and appreciation for everything he explores and discovers. He has a way of expressing his unbounded delight as well as deep knowledge that is infectious and inspiring. And now, at age ninety-four, after all the years of giving us windows into the far corners of the living world, Attenborough asks for something in return. He charges us to live differently, more consciously and carefully, more modestly and with thought for the creatures with which we share this planet, our only home. He does it in all seriousness for time is short and the consequences dire if we should shrug. But he commands our attention with great love and humility, which is irresistible.
Using his own lifespan as a measuring stick, Attenborough takes us through the decades of rapid and unprecedented changes that have overtaken the world and which now challenge the foundations of life everywhere. He admits that at first it was a stealthy creep, largely unnoticed, but now it’s unavoidable, to be seen wherever one looks. From the ocean depths to polar icecaps to lands striped of their forest cover and rivers dammed and polluted, human beings have left their giant footprint not only where we dwell in our multitudes but even where we cannot go. In this era of the Anthropocene, humans sully the atmosphere and degrade the chemical composition of ocean waters; we leave nothing untouched. As he so aptly puts it, we humans through our carelessness and inattention are “sleepwalking into catastrophe.”
As important as it is to grasp this record of damage, Attenborough knows that however well-put a litany of disaster will not help us change our ways. After thoroughly documenting the ills threatening life on Earth, he shifts his focus to what we can do to first slow the spreading damage and even to reverse it and heal the wounds we have perpetuated. He lists nine areas that need our attention. Taken all at once, that can be overwhelming, but as he works through his points, a different realization emerges: Almost anything we do for any of these issues would be a help. It sounds like a contradiction but we can all start practically anywhere to make a difference. Whatever our predilections, talents, and resources, we can get to work to turn our situation around; the problems are so vast that all hands are needed on this deck. Attenborough, yes, throws down the gauntlet, but he also welcomes everyone to step up and join him in this greatest struggle of our time.
So the book is hopeful. That’s the gift. We are all needed. First, through his documentaries Attenborough brought us close-up encounters with life all over the world and unabashedly shared his great love and enthusiasm for every creature. And now he invites us all to show our own love by saving the marvels he has brought us. This is a remarkable, heart-opening reading experience. Not to be missed.
We can share these gifts and invitations to wonder—and calls to action—with longtime birders and with those we know who are just beginning to look about themselves and are curious about what might be seen. And in this case, as with chocolate, one for them and one for us is a very good motto to follow!
