Eight for the Birds!

I've noted before how this time of year always makes me think of birds. By 'this time of year' I mean late autumn, and I mean that mainly because that's what it says on the calendar here in Boston, not because that any longer coincides with actual lived reality. It's been in the high-70s with saturation-point humidity all week here, shorts-and-sandals weather in late October in New England, so that even though the trees are turning colors, I'm still arriving at the subway station drenched in sweat and panting like a circus bear. Once upon a time, before the George W. Bush administration, the world still had frogs and glaciers and, in New England anyway, four distinct seasons. This is no longer true - the last 27 weeks of crushing, stultifying summer heat and humidity commenced exactly 4 hours after the last snowstorm of last winter, and the freezing cold and blowing snow of this coming winter will descend somewhere around 9 pm on a day in late November that will hit 70 at 1 pm.

God only knows what this kind of thing will do to the birds of the world, but they'll stay preserved in books regardless, and although the heat and humidity these days in Boston presents no actual physical reason for many of our seasonal species to migrate to warmer climates, they'll no doubt migrate anyway, driven by instinct. Soon, the path around Jamaica Pond will be much quieter; soon, the optimistically orderly streets of Forest Hills Cemetery will be comparatively bare of the raucous multitude of species that filled the greenery during our incredibly long, unbelievably pestilential over-summer. That fact naturally gets me thinking about bird books for beginner and expert alike, for people who've never set foot in a meadow at sunset and those who have to be dragged out of their nearby hills and marshes by their long-suffering loved ones. Here are eight such books that merit your attention:

Peterson's First Guides: Birds (1986)

The First Guides are slim and short and as basic as a stubbed toe: in the case of Birds (which has lots of illustrations reprinted from Roger Tory Peterson's 1980 A Field Guide to Birds), these extremely portable 128 pages take the user straight into the rudiments of what they need to start birding out in field and stream. The guide covers 188 of the most common species of North American birds, with quick paragraph-long descriptions on facing pages with color illustrations. The descriptions identify things like yellow beaks with italics, and the corresponding picture will have a black arrow pointing straight at that feature - like having a somewhat didactic guide along, only without the temptation to kick him into a culvert. There are of course squintillions of basic guidebooks out there, but this one is the best combination of convenient and informative, and it fits into just about any convenient space you have left over from all your other gear.

The Golden Guide: Birds (1949)

We've covered this marvellous volume here on Stevereads before, but even so, I couldn't let a list like this one go by without including it again. For all that the Golden Guides have been surpassed as practical identification guides, they still retain the ample charm and assurance of the 1940s, and none of these little books is more charming than Birds. Here we have Arctic terns wheeling over the cold ocean with a freighter on the distant horizon; here we have tree sparrows singing lustily as the trees bud out all around them; here we have the bobolink serenading the sunrise in a northern marsh; here we have an osprey carrying a captured fish above a mist-blurred line of channel-markers; here we have a barn owl perched within view of a sleeping farmhouse at night - and many more, a small but choice slice of the bird-life of North America, and a must-have for any bird enthusiast.

The Life of Birds by David Attenborough (1998)

Speaking of bird enthusiasts - I sincerely believe that Attenborough may just be the most passionate such enthusiast on Earth. Certainly he's the most well-known, being the front-man for a dozen epic nature documentaries, including the simply life-changing Planet Earth. One of the most heartfelt and personal-feeling of all those documentaries was 1998's resplendent Life of Birds, and its attendant book, although best read in conjunction with that documentary, can certainly be adored on its own. I've sung its praises here before, but like the Golden Guide, I couldn't resist putting it on this list, because everybody who's interested in birds should find it here in addition to rooting around in the back-stacks for it! In the book, Attenborough examines all the different aspects of bird life, from what they eat to where they live (and how they live there) to how they find their mates to the great chapter titled "The Demands of the Egg," and the whole thing is rendered in the written equivalent of Attenborough's genial, avuncular omniscience. There are dozens and dozens of gorgeous photos too - again, not a rarity in the bird-book world, but never done more winningly than here.

The Wind Birds by Peter Matthiessen (1967)

Like Attenborough, Matthiessen is one of our great naturalists (in addition to being a great novelist, of course), and the fact that he's a bird enthusiast couldn't be more obviously displayed than in this wonderful book about the many kinds of birds who make their homes along those blessed strips of America where the oceans meet the land. This is a book full of bird lore and anecdote, full of digressions, and full of sandpipers (the only bird other than wood warblers that's always struck me as being almost entirely composed of pure enchantment), and all of it is beautifully illustrated by Robert Gillmor. People lucky enough to live near North American shorelines (especially along the eastern seacoast of the country, naturally) have the pick of the very best the bird-world has to offer: they have forests, mountains, ponds, dunes, the active tidal zone, and that most sublime of all natural habitats, the salt water marsh - and in all of those habitats, birds run riot in all their diversity and ingenuity. Matthiessen captures all that diversity and ingenuity in his prose, that nimble, gorgeous prose that always strikes a reader as so much better than they remembered it. Matthiessen's body of work is enormous, and the list of nature books is long and full of famous titles. This book isn't one of those famous titles, and I think that's a shame - there's some sparkling prose here, much of it disarmingly confessional. Like Attenborough's boo, The Wind Birds is no kind of practical guide - but it should be on the bird-shelf of any self-respecting library just the same.

That Quail, Robert by Margaret Stanger (1966)

I've certainly praised this little classic many times before in my life (although memory fails if I've ever praised it here at Stevereads), and I've given copies of it in all its many editions to everybody I even half-suspect might enjoy it and pass it along themselves. It's the story of a brainy Cape Cod family who find a quail egg and decided to try to save and raise the chick inside. That miserable little speck hatches and grows up to be Robert, the quail of the title and star of the brief spring and summer of fame that publication brought to the lives of the humans involved. Robert imprinted to his humans and adapted immediately to life far away from his wild kindred, and the book's main source of comedy and insight is its account of the many pitfalls Robert endures as he tries to understand the weird bipedal creatures with whom his lot's been cast. This is a bird-book classic on the same level as my beloved Owl, and it has the same immediate, universal appeal.

A Pocket Guide to Birds and How to Identify and Enjoy Them by Allan Cruickshank (1953)

This sturdy staple has been reprinted a bunch of times and even superseded in some respects by other books over the years, but it still wins a place on this list because it's far more ample than the First Guide and yet still a handy paperback that can fit in pocket or pack. Cruickshank was an absolutely captivating lecturer for the National Audubon Society, and he distilled a lifetime of introducing people to the joys of birding into this volume, which also features over 70 color photos by the author's wife Helen and 78 vivid, marvellous line-drawings by Don Eckelberry. The combination of photos and drawings is a fortunate one - it allows both a greater certainty of identification and a more intimate awareness of why anybody would bother to identify birds in the first place; the photos are accurate, and the drawings are charming. The book also makes the requisite utterly hopeless attempts to describe what bird-calls actually sound like, but readers familiar with bird-books can see that train-wreck coming and even take pleasure from it.

Birds Through an Opera Glass by Florence Merriam (1889)

Speaking of that hopeless endeavor, it's a big part of this extremely popular and enduring (for a while, anyway) birding-introduction from a century ago. Merriam originally wrote most of the material for her chapters for the old Audubon magazine, and when the success of those articles gave rise to a book, she borrowed the black-and-white illustrations from The History of North American Birds by Baird, Brewer, and Ridgway and commissioned a small handful of color plates to be 'tipped in,' which was a process by which the card-sized illustrations were shuffled into the pages of the book - at a time when working actual color plates into a mass-printed book was either impossible or ruinously expensive, 'tipping in' photos was a popular alternative (the first edition of Hawthorne's The Marble Faun illustrated in this way was a runaway best-seller, for instance). The only problem now, over 100 years later, is that pictures capable of being tipped in can be tipped out again - it's virtually impossible to find an ordinary second-hand copy of this book (which was originally made as part of the "Riverside Library for Young People") that retains all its color illustrations. Collectors sift through them like garden snakes, and even packing and unpacking from apartment to apartment over the course of 28 years can send pictures into oblivion. My own copy, for instance (which isn't second-hand), still has only the lonely full-color picture of an Indigo Bird. But the real draw, of course, is Merriam's plummy prose, complete with easily-parodied bits like "When the oriole comes to build his nest and you compare his work with that of the robin, you feel that you have an artistic Queen Anne beside a rude mud hovel."

The Book of North American Birds (1990)

This sturdy, oversized Reader's Digest production is positively lavish with color illustrations that are bound right into the book - no tipping-out here! Instead, for over 500 glorious though impractical pages (any birder who could take this volume along on his hikes would be a birder I wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley), we get the bursting panoply of birds in all their glory, brought to readers through the delicate work of some of the best bird artists of the 20th century, all gathered together here and doing humble, collaborative wonders. Raymond Harris Ching, John P. O'Neill, H. Jon Janosik, Cynthia House, Walter Ferguson, the great Hans Peeters, and even somebody who rejoices in the name of Julie Zickefoose - all these and many more fill this book with color illustrations that are at once accurate and idealized. These oversized Reader's Digest editions are all marvels (we'll get to all of them eventually here at Stevereads), and the generous size of the pages is particularly advantageous to the subject of birds (several of the smaller song birds here are represented at almost life-size). This is a book to explore lovingly only after the day's wanderings outside are done and the supper is put away.

 

 

The Golden Nature Guide to Birds!

Our book today is a tiny little classic close to my heart: the 1949 Golden Nature Guide to American birds – part of the quietly fantastic Golden Nature Guide series that we'll get around to one of these days here at Stevereads. And this great little book is on my mind this evening for a familiar melancholy reason. Late September and October signal a change in the nature of the bird-world all around us – the population changes. Everybody who's hard-wired to migrate is either gone by now or is all fattened up and ready to go, leaving New England with a sparser nation of birdhood, mostly populated by our hardy year-rounders.

It's the kind of simple observation that's utterly alien to all those of you who wouldn't notice the bird-world if they're lives depended on it, and of course it's to sway and entice those very people. The simple optimism of the book's ethos is wonderful – and, those first editors hoped, contagious: all you need to join the world of birding is a pair of eyes. And that encouragement is couched in 1950s complacency – as an old friend of mine proved to his own satisfaction (and decades-long enjoyment), you can do perfectly well with only a pair of ears.

The book set the template for all those that followed. We get a general introduction to the subject of birds and birding; we get a brief sketch of their natural history; we get a glimpse of their biology; we get that ringing endorsement of the whole concept of simply going outside and watching them (or even staying inside – and this I can attest to as well: the joys of a bird-feeder well-placed for indoor viewing are not to be underestimated); and then we're off to the descriptions.

I've never been able to determine with 100 percent certainty who the unassuming artist was who gave us all the enchanting color illustrations in this Golden Guide. I suspect it was the great Arthur Singer or one of his many disciples, but whoever it was, those little pictures have captivated me for half a century. They're practical purpose is to show at one glance the kind of place you're most likely to encounter the bird starring in the picture – a plowed field for the mourning dove, for instance, or a building ledge (with poop!) for a pigeon, or a picturesque mountain lake for the loon. But for me, they've always had more than practicality to them – they've been discreet little compositions, as self-contained and evocative as an Audobon setting.

Almost all of the Golden Guides are like that to one extent or another – virtually none of them disappoints. But the recurrent theme of the paragraph-long descriptions in the bird guide underscores the emphatic presence of birds, their vibrant uniqueness. Time and again we're told what we're told about, for instance, the red-winged blackbird: that the markings of these birds are incredibly distinctive, impossible to miss or confuse. Of course that's the point of a beginner's guide like this one – it only lists the main examples of the most easily found and observed kinds of birds. Like all Golden Guides, it's main purpose is to encourage.

Most subsequent guide books inadvertently sabotage that encouragement while in the act of facilitating it. They still show you the birds in a typical setting, but they bombard you with half a dozen seasons and plumages and genders and ages. Their goal is laudatory – they want you to be absolutely certain what you're looking at. But the end result more often than not runs counter to intuition – we get a picture featuring the adolescent male and female colorations and fully adult male and female colorations and seasonal colorations, all jammed together into one drawing. It's definitely more comprehensive, but it makes me miss the simplicity of the old guides.

I think about those old guides – and the bird guide in particular – every year when the weather changes and the bite of autumn can be felt in the middle of my kitchen. Even in the depths of the woods surrounding Forest Hills Cemetery, the bird population has thinned and changed. It's not drabber, not at all (that's only the surface appearance to those who don't spend time looking), but nonetheless, there are quite a few people missing, gone on their way to Florida or South America or Africa. The months will feel long until one by one they begin to return, and every year I'm glad I have this guide to tide me over.

The Life of Birds!

Our book today is David Attenborough's masterpiece, The Life of Birds, and for many readers the temptation here will be to conflate the book with the absolutely heartbreakingly good BBC television mini-series, also by Attenborough, to which this book is the companion. A certain amount of this conflation is unavoidable – the book was written in conjunction with the series, after all. But the book is able to go into far more detail, and reading it is a very different experience than watching the TV show. Both experiences are utterly enchanting, but each has its own distinct enchantment.

To put it mildly, there are lots of bird books out there. There are volumes on bird evolution, history, physiology, cognition, and ecological survival. The Life of Birds touches on all of those things, but if it's the single greatest bird book ever written (I contend it is), that's not the reason. Rather, the reason is the entirely unselfconscious way it exults in birds, in the whole world of them. Attenborough has always had a soft spot for birds as a subject matter, and he's famously trekked all over the world to look at, whisper to, and marvel about virtually every kind of bird on the planet. His most charming habit is his immediate identification with his charges in all their infinite variety:

The sun bittern uses visual signals. It builds its nest in swampy regions of the South American rain forest. When it is sitting, it is difficult to detect for its brown plumage, barred with thin wavy stripes of grey, white, and olive, blends in closely with its background. But if you do see it and walk slowly towards it, the bird, most unexpectedly, will fan its tail and spread its wings, revealing on each a bright chestnut patch, edged on the upper side with black and heightened by a surround of glowing gold. The two patches glare at you like a pair of huge eyes. If you stand your ground, the bird will rise and stalk towards you with such confidence that anyone unfamiliar with it might be forgiven for thinking that the creature in front of them was actually dangerous. That, doubtless, is the intended message. It is not, of course, true. The bird is telling a lie.

Readers who come to this book from the mini-series – indeed, from any David Attenborough nature series – will know to expect another aspect too, and they won't be disappointed: in the mini-series and in much greater detail in the book, our author has a penchant for telling us amazing natural history stories we never quite knew before, like the unbelievable birth of the humble megapode:

Of all the ground-nesting birds, the most swiftly independent is the infant megapode. Its incubation period is particularly long – sixty to eighty days. The egg, being buried in a mound, does not have to withstand being rolled around and sat on, as eggs in nests must be able to do. Accordingly, it has one of the thinnest of shells and the chick is able to break its way without much effort. Indeed, although some three weeks before it hatches, the little egg tooth begins to develop on its beak, this come to nothin and soon disappears unused. The megapode chick is the only bird that manages to break out of its shell without the assistance of such a tool. But the task that it next faces is a very exhausting one. Above it lies a foot or so of earth. Lying on its back, it kicks out with its feet which, like those of its parents, are disproportionately large. As it loosens the earth, it humps its back and wriggles so that dislodged soil is pushed beneath it and it slowly moves upward. All this activity is fuelled entirely by the remains of the huge yolk which lies in its infant stomach. It will take several days to dig its way up to the surface, but by the time it does arrive there, it is a totally independent individual with a full complement of feathers that are so well developed that it is able to fly immediately.

And The Life of Birds, like all Attenborough's marvellous books (cynicism would guess that they're all factory-written by interns and assistants and then polished by the man himself, but since such cynicism makes the same claim about the speeches and histories of Winston Churchill, I'm content no matter what the truth of it may end up being), has something often sorely lacking from other fact-filled works of natural history: sweep. His books take on big subjects and never let us forget how big they are. The many amazing species of birds in these pages are living in some of the most dramatic ways of any life-form on Earth, and all of that drama is captured perfectly here, as in this passage about the great crowds of emperor penguins incubating their eggs while their females are off in the northern oceans feeding:

As the winter winds begin to blow, the days darken, the temperatures fall, and the emperors huddle closer and closer together. The blizzards increase in severity, the wind screams across the ice at 100 miles an hour and the males huddle still closer, their beaks drawn down to their chests so that the napes of their necks, pressed tightly together, form a feathered roof with scarcely a gap between them. They have nothing to eat. Mid-winter comes and for a month there is total darkness, except for the shifting veils and curtains of the Southern Lights playing overhead.

I can't recommend The Life of Birds highly enough, whether you've seen the mini-series of the same name or not (of course, I can't recommend the mini-series highly enough either, but that would be a different blog altogether). The world's most remarkable animal is not man (nor, alas, is it dog), and that most remarkable kind has its greatest portrait here.

Birds in the Garden - and How to Attract Them!

Our book today is Margaret McKenny's chatty, amiable little 1939 classic Birds in the Garden - and How to Attract Them, which features a Preface by Clyde Fisher from the American Museum of Natural History, several stunning color plates by Thomas S. Roberts, and best of all, page after page of Miss McKenny's enthusiastic, entirely sensible advice about the pleasures of birds in the garden.

There's a temptation, of course, to mock such books as this (a temptation P. G. Wodehouse yields to on more than one occasion, especially when the task falls to Jeeves to ghost-write a similar volume); after all, the world in 1939 had far more serious matters on its plate than various stratagems to lure birds into suburban gardens.


But the temptation should be resisted. Bird books have always been as decorous and largely benign as their subjects (with the slim and disturbing exception of T. H. White's The Goshawk), and there is a place in any world, no matter how dark, for both. Birds are like all other nonhuman animals in that they spend all day (as the famous wag once put it) going about their own business, but there are three key differences almost unique to them: they're very, very visible, they're uniformly beautiful, and large numbers of them have little or no aversion to interacting with mankind.

Miss McKenny recounts many dozens of stories about the charming insouciance of garden birds once they come to be familiar with their local humans - especially if those humans have made themselves known as sources of food. This is easy enough to confirm for yourself, even if you don't possess one of the fairly opulent private gardens that are Miss McKenny's standing assumption. A folding chair on a small porch will do - sit down, crumble up some bread on the floor around your feet, and chances are in fifteen minutes you'll have feathered company. Even as quick as a second consecutive day of this will suffice to make that hand-out expected. Leave a window open in the summer, and you'll very likely soon have birds flitting through your apartment, finding the kitchen, and looking for food:

A story told by Mr. Forbush in Birds of Massachusetts illustrates graphically how confiding birds may become and how much pleasure and entertainment may be derived from feeding them. He writes that a flock of 150 pine siskins, little striped brown birds, closely related to the goldfinches, had been fed all winter by Mr. Davis, and had grown very tame and confiding. The birds one morning were ready for breakfast long before he was awake, but there was no food in the trays. For a while the birds sat around in forlorn groups in the trees, then they began to fly into the open windows of Mr. Davis' bedroom. By this time he was awake but pretended to be still sleeping, so several of the siskins hopped on the bed and then came to his face and pulled at his hair. He still pretended to sleep, and they braced themselves and pulled still harder, and even began to tweak his nose and ears. One morning he covered his face with a cloth, leaving only a peephole, but one bird discovered the hole and tapped through it on his forehead. He then turned to the dish in which he kept the seed, and one little fellow lit on his hand and rode over on it so as to beat the others to the feast.

In fact, this particular phenomenon, this shared interspecies playfulness, is a continuing refrain not only in Miss McKenny's book but throughout the kinder side of man's treatment of birds. Avian life has always fascinated humans - in my opinion because the two are so much alike, with the same darting attentions, the same instantaneous inventiveness, many of the same silly priorities (fashion and home ownership, to name but two) - and Miss McKenny is quick to point out the ironic contrast involved in that:

When one thinks of the prevalent human attitude of hostility toward wild life, it seems amazing with what gentleness and kindness nearly everyone responds when one of our smaller birds shows confidence in approaching. [Forbush again] quotes the story of a farmer sitting on a snowdrift surrounded by a hundred redpolls, some of them feeding on scattered hayseed, some of them perched on his head and shoulders, and one on his knee. The farmer, one in his emotion with poet and philosopher, said that he had enjoyed himself more than at any other time he could remember.

Of course, Miss McKenny can be considerably more bloody-minded when it comes to bird-on-bird violence, as when she rhapsodizes about the sparrow hawk perhaps a trifle too enthusiastically:

This little hawk, reddish above and buffy below, with a chestnut crown on his bluish-gray head, is not much larger than a robin. Like the tree swallow, it has adapted itself to the ways of civilization and now nests quite frequently in a hollow tree on a village street, or in a birdbox in the garden. It is not only one of the most beautiful and brightly colored of the hawks, but one of the most useful. If, some morning, we hear its noisy "killee, killee" in our garden, we may know that we are sheltering the foe not only of insects but of meadow mice - those destroyers of tulip bulbs and girdlers of trees. Perhaps during the nesting season it may take an occasional song bird, but even then its prey usually is an English sparrow, which certainly we can spare without a pang.

But the real and abundant theme of Birds in the Garden is joy - the particular frequency of joy (small, illuminating, and, amazingly, innocent) that can be derived only from getting to know the birds. Even in Miss McKenny's most utilitarian passages (the book is full of useful diagrams of gardens and birdhouses, and useful lists of which birds are attracted to which plants, and in which season), that joy is right underneath the surface, waiting to burst forth, as in this account of mating practices of the common wren:

The male usually arrives first from the South. Immediately, if there is a suitable box he takes his stand upon it and from then on until the female arrives he spends his time casting his bubbles of song toward the sky to let all and sundry know about his territory. Between intervals of song he carries into the box the most impossible looking twigs, so that things will be well started when the laggard mate shows up. And when she does arrive! Such ecstasy! Showering a very cascade of notes he will throw himself skyward, only to arch downward toward the beloved one who, ignoring him, as soon as she arrives begins to throw out every stick which her mate has so laboriously dragged in.

Birds in the Garden was given a generous print-run by Grosset & Dunlap, a lifetime ago, and it's had a few reprints since then - it's not hard to find. And it's light-hearted, matter-of-fact sweetness will captivate you, like the decorative flitterings of an oriole on a picture-perfect Sunday morning. Even back in the dark days of 1939, there was still fit employment for such joy, and likely there always will be.

Books! Birds and Bea!

As some of you doubtless know, we here at Stevereads love a good animal-book. Not formal, documented natural history - although Gawd knows we love those too - but those which for want of a better word we'll call anecdotal. Of these there are three kinds, one of each of which recently crossed our path: the kind where the animal in question is a domesticated pet, the kind where a wild animal is taken into benign captivity, and the kind where some enterprising human goes out to live with an alien species.

The first kind is the most accessible - everybody's had a pet at some point, and many pet-owners believe it would be duck soup to write such a book. Every year, some new bestseller will come along with an adorable dust jacket picture of the dog, cat, parrot, or pig in question. These stories are perforce of a type - that's their appeal, and exceptions are generally unwelcome (as was the case with Jon Katz' execrable "A Good Dog," in which he broke with formula by executing the star of his story in mid-book). These books comfort by offering a mirror to their readers' experience.

Our example today of this first kind is "For Bea - The Story of the Beagle Who Changed My Life" by Kristin Von Kreisler, the story of a woman who comes into possession of a slightly broken-down beagle who'd been the subject of lab research. Some of you will no doubt guess our feelings here at Stevereads about medical research conducted on dogs, especially beagles. Von Kreisler got off comparatively easy: her beagle hadn't lost her eyes to cosmetics acidity testing, hadn't lost her legs to stress-fracture tests, hadn't lost huge chunks of skin to artificially induced tumors.

No, as far as Von Kreisler could determine, poor Bea was 'only' used for repeated breeding of other victims. She's a sweet-natured, long-suffering dog whose nervous reluctance to trust or love her new human caretakers is both understandable and movingly described. I especially liked how Von Kreisler risks the ridicule of her readers by unhesitatingly referring to the 'conversations' she has with Bea. Dog-owners will know that such 'conversations' really happen - and beagle owners will know that with this particular breed, they practically happen in English.

This is a warm, untaxing book that can be whole-heartedly recommended to any dog-owner. Von Kreisler's tone is a bit overwrought and dippy, but self-consciously and thus endearingly so. Dog people will be nodding in agreement the whole time they're reading it.

Our current example of the second kind is that perennial little classic, Margaret Stanger's "That Quail, Robert," the story of a Cape Cod couple who find a quail egg (probably Laprodus laprodus, although nobody's counting), take it home as a curiosity, and are as surprised as anybody when it hatches into a noisy, needy little chick.

As the book's many thousands of readers already know, there follows a quintessential story of inter-species exploration. That quail, Robert (so dubbed by accident, even though he turned out to be a she), quickly takes command of the household, quirkily investigating everything and everyone.

This type of anecdotal account has its predictable joys - foremost of which is watching the little alien being try to understand all the mundane realities of our daily lives. The animal in question - whether it's a tiny quail or Elsa, the lioness from "Born Free," perhaps the quintessential exemplar of the type - takes nothing for granted and understands nothing of human life, so we are allowed through them to see ourselves anew and re-assess our daily priorities. Those daily priorities never look more adorable - and negotiable (it's always amazing how many parts of their former lives our host recipients appear willing to sacrifice, upon demand) than when someone like Robert is turning them upside-down.

The third kind of animal-book is represented here by a new and altogether remarkable work by Joe Hutto called "Illumination in the Flatwoods." Hutto 'imprinted' two dozen wild turkeys and parented them to adulthood, taking meticulous observations along the way. The result, told in fine clear prose and copiously illustrated by the author, is quietly, unassumingly unforgettable.

Hutto spends a great deal of his time just out walking ('foraging,' he puts it, often making it sound like he himself is out grubbing for termites) with his brood, encountering all the things they encounter (creeks, rotting logs, and a disconcerting number of rattlesnakes) and noting all their behavior. I'd like to say it would be impossible to think of turkeys the same way again after reading this book - utterly unthinkable to EAT one, for instance - but I've met my share of dedicated fowlers, and I know this wonderful, heartfelt book would only serve to make them hungry.

But the REST of you will find it fascinating and involving! Hutto carefully reigns in his sentimentality and just writes about what he sees, but you end up attached to his brood anyway.

Of course, the problem with all three kinds of animal-books is their inevitable ending. To speak plain, the animal always dies. With Bea and that quail, Robert, the scenes are written with deeply moving sensitivity - with Hutto's turkeys, the end is less conclusive: animals prefer to die in private (if given the chance, even domesticated pets will do so), so the natural observer like Hutto will most often only be able to note the last time he saw an individual. The feeling of inevitability is still there, but it's softened by the chance, however long, that you'll run into that individual at the head of the trail one of these days.

In any case, these are three excellent examples of their kind! They come with the Stevereads stamp of approval, if you're in the mood for animal-books!