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Tim Gallagher, editor of the Cornell Ornithology Lab's Living Bird magazine, spent decades glassing the cypress swamps and bayous of eastern Arkansas, looking for the ivory bill woodpecker—a bird presumed to be extinct. Pulitzer Prize-nominee Scott Weidensaul tramped South America, searching for the elusive cone-billed tanager. Every year, people spend thousands of dollars voyaging to Antarctica to see penguins and unusual water birds.
Hacking through jungles, freezing in Arctic seas … it seems there are no remote areas that passionate birders won't venture to in hopes of seeing something exciting. But writer John Yow finds he can see plenty of interesting birds by journeying no farther than his back porch deck chair amid 40 acres of northwestern Georgia woods. Yow is a self-confessed "armchair birder," which he defines as a person "too lazy to get up and 'go birding.' "
In his charming The Armchair Birder: Discovering the Secret Lives of Familiar Birds, Yow shares folklore, life habits, and enjoyable personal anecdotes about 42 species of birds that are commonly seen in and around the backyard. As he puts it, "What I do, mostly, is hang feeders and watch the birds that come to me." When he spies a new species, he is, as Keats says, "some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken."
Yow's book is pleasantly organized by season—Georgia seasons, that is—with roughly ten species for each. In the southeast, this means you get the Sandhill crane in winter and the Carolina wren in spring. While this is no less engaging for readers in other portions of the country (like this midwestern reviewer) it does require that you orient yourself to his locale.
On those terms, Yow gives us a porch-side seat for the rich and colorful doings of the bird world. No matter if he is cheering on the tanagers as they decimate the pesky wasp population in his backyard or decrying the much-maligned brown-headed cowbirds and their parasitical habits, Yow's observations are humorous and informative.
As well as relying on his own backyard observations, he heavily mines numerous sources for his essays: "If you're like me, knowing what [the birds] look like just whets your appetite for knowing what they're up to." Yow prefers the classic ornithology experts, such as Arthur Cleveland Bent, Edward Howe Forbush, and John James Audubon, spiked with plentiful updated info from The Birds of North America Online. In a sense, this book is a digest of information culled from these sources, framed by Yow's anecdotal encounters with the birds.
In each five- or six-page essay, Yow explores courtship rituals, nesting habits, and his own experiences with a particular bird. He often starts his chapters with a little discourse on how the bird got its name, coupled with some mythology.
Of the belted kingfisher, for example, Yow writes that its scientific name, Megaceryle alcyon, comes from the ancient Greek name for the birds, expressive of their belief that the fisher birds nested on the open sea. Hence the term "halcyon days": the Greeks believed the gods smiled on kingfishers during nesting time and calmed the waters for "days of peace and well-being." In Greek mythology, Alcyon was one of the seven daughters of Atlas, known collectively as the Pleiades (for whom the star cluster is named). Grieving the loss of her husband in a shipwreck, Alcyon threw herself into the sea. The gods changed them both into kingfishers. After reading Yow's essay, I'll never look at a kingfisher without a sense of these associations.
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