Armchair Birding: Spark Birds
~ Anne Kilgannon
For a slim book, this anthology is bursting… flowing over… replete—that is, stuffed—with thoughts about and experiences with birds, some familiar to us birders and some you long to have in your own life with these remarkable creatures. Birds grab our imagination and soar us into the sky, they lift our hearts when we need it most, sometimes make us laugh, and awaken us like shafts of light with their dawn chorus. But we also know that birds are in serious trouble and we are losing them: sorrow, frustration, and loss underlay our joy as we fill our feeders and set out fresh water on ever-hotter days. Spark Birds touches on all these mixed emotions; writer by writer find the words to express our wonderment and our worry. They do it with poems, stories, memoir, and close observations: more than thirty different ways. As many ways as there are birds… you feel they are just getting started. When you get to the last piece you could easily turn back and read the selections all again and still find something new, still marvel at the myriad ways humans connect with birds.
In his Foreword, Jonathan Franzen examines what makes a good nature narrative and concludes that the most effective writing is grounded in that connection between humans and birds. It’s not enough, he writes, to describe birds, as beautiful and various as they are, but we must also feel with the author the impact of that bird, how they open him or her up to the world, how they change lives by their presence, by their antics and idiosyncrasies, their otherness and their shared existence. How they make a story and spark thought, spark change, spark love. The writing is powerful in so many different ways: from Mary Oliver to Terry Tempest Williams, David Gessner to J. Drew Lanham, Elizabeth Kolbert to William Stafford, and names new to me, ones from which I will now look for more. The writers featured in this book follow the adage “to show, not merely tell.” They burn with the spark birds have lit; there is both pain and joy in their cupped hands holding the flame of inspiration for us readers.
An added delight are images of birds carved from birds—at least their feathers—in flight, in repose, and everything in between, created by our own Chris Maynard. His art is scattered throughout the book, wordless but full of expression. There is a mythic story in each image.
All these pieces create a whole; all contribute as blazing facets to this gem of a book. As is my tradition here, I highly recommend this book as a gift for the season for anyone who loves great writing and/or loves birds, even if they don’t yet know it or know why they might. The more-than-thirty stories within will find their way to spark birds.
