Bird Book Review

I am mesmerized by these beautiful words in a review of birding books, by Laura Jacob, in the Wall Street Journal:

It is wonder that brings young people into birding and wonder that holds older people there. All levels of passion have a place. There are, for instance, backyard birders watching the feeder through the window over the sink; there are compulsive birders, collectors who drop everything to drive or fly to the next new bird for their list; and there are cowboy birders, young men who can identify teeny warblers in silhouette at dawn, all based on a bird's flight call or tail length. They're doing calculus while the rest of us are doing basic math, listening every spring to tapes of warbler song, poring endlessly over the imperceptible differences of Empids—those difficult little flycatchers. 

The pursuit of such mastery must eventually make room for what Keats called "negative capability," an aptitude for "being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact." The cyclical nature of birding, its concentration on the horizon and the sky, its unanswered questions about migration, speak to unknowns, to the unthinkables in life: time and loss and life span. Birds bring us these complex questions of existence, but quietly, dressed in feathers and flight. 

"A good ornithologist," writes Gilbert White, the author of the 18th-century classic "The Natural History of Selbourne," "should be able to distinguish birds by their air." Such is the transcendence that birders work toward, the moment when experience becomes instinct. Deep beneath the social, competitive, aesthetic and poetic attractions of birding is a longing, not for Eden, where nothing was yet named and knowledge was unnecessary, but for a role in nature's mystery play, where to tell a hawk from a handsaw is a matter of life and death.