My Nerdy Friend

Written by Scott Weidensaul, Paintings by Nancy Lane

This is a children’s book that tells the tale of bird migration from South America to Northern Canada through the journey of a Yellow Warbler. I love this, because a Yellow Warbler was one of the first warblers I was able to see “in the wild” in the bushes and trees around my home, and is absolutely the first that I could identify by its song! So this book is near and dear to my heart.

A little Yellow Warbler starts her day in the jungles of South America. She feels different this day, and has the urge to eat and eat and eat. A young girl collecting coffee beans spots the Yellow Warbler flying through the trees.¹

The Yellow Warbler flies for weeks, all day and all night, catching north winds to carry over the Gulf of Mexico. She is joined by thousands of other birds all heading north. To find rest, she needs the cool shade of lush trees.²

The Yellow Warbler flies over spruce fir trees, on and on, until the trees become fewer and fewer. Until she reaches the tundra. Here, finally, she has reached her summer home where she will find a mate and raise her chicks.

The book wraps up with a list of easy ways for everyone to help Warblers and other migrating birds, some of which just happen to be included in the footnotes below. Two more that I am particularly passionate about: apply bird-safe anti-collision stickers to your windows and keep your cats indoors!!! Anyway, back to the book. If you want a book that is going to make your child fall in love with birds, this one is a good bet!

I was provided with an advanced Proof copy of this delightful book, so no photos are attached. This is particularly unfortunate because the book is resplendent with breathtaking oil paintings by fine artist Nancy Lane. See how for yourself: the paintings from the book are posted on her website!

¹ Buy certified shade-grown coffee. Traditional shade coffee farms are a favourite habitat for migrant bird, but these farms are being destroyed to raise cheaper, high-yield sun-grown coffee. Look for the Bird Friendly certification bestowed by the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center.

² Plant native trees and fruit-bearing bushes of varying heights and sized in your yard. Birds like to rest within the safety of trees and shrubs, and if you have bird feeders, you will attract more birds when you provide a variety of native plants as well.

Why Birds Sing is a fun, somewhat light-hearted read by Canadian author Nina Berkhout. I say ‘light-hearted’ because while there are humourous, quirky, entertaining moments, there are also moments of family drama and soul searching.

After Opera singer Dawn Woodward jeopardizes her career by competitively pushing herself too hard and injuring both her vocal cords and her reputation, she is sidelined into teaching a group of Roger-Whittaker-wannabes to whistle. At the same time, her estranged brother-in-law shows up on her doorstep looking for a place to live while he undergoes cancer treatment. As a special surprise, he brings his needy companion, a Congo African Grey parrot named Tulip. As you might predict, it’s Dawn and Tulip who form an unlikely bond, while Dawn begins to question her life and the decisions she has made.

This book seems to get a lot of things right in regards to raising an African Grey parrot. They are excellent mimickers, and are highly intelligent. They form strong bonds with their owners and can be emotionally needy as a result. They can live a long time (up to 80 years in captivity) but they don’t adjust well to being bounced around from owner to owner, so it’s important to think long-term when considering one as a pet. They need lots of mental stimulation to keep from getting bored and acting out. I can’t say I recommend adopting an exotic bird, but in fairness I did not find any site that suggested this was a terrible idea, like say adopting a monkey or a boa constrictor. So there you go.

Once again I am kind of cheating, because I wrote very briefly about this book in a previous post.

The bell woke me. I didn’t know how much time had passed. I rushed to straighten the bed, pulled the French doors closed, ran upstairs and splashed cold water on my face. Tying my knotted hair back, I opened the door.

Tariq stood at the bottom of the steps with a duffel bag. He appeared thinner and more disheveled than the last time I’d seen him, like any recently divorced man in his early forties who wasn’t taking care of himself. And he had the same stance I’d noticed on every occasion we met. Slightly stooped with his hands behind his back, like the elders of opera who paced around on stage in fur-lined robes, but did not do much singing anymore.

His hair was as thick and black as Ashraf’s, only shorter and ?ecked with grey. He was taller than his brother, his skin and eyes darker. I wanted to know how long he planned on staying and the details of his illness. At the same time I was trying to recall the melody in the dream I’d been torn from.

I said hello. He nodded wordlessly, as though he were the one on vocal rest. Then I spotted a small cage in the grass behind him. When I passed him to get a glimpse, he lowered his head and stepped aside.

I had expected a songbird but this foot-tall feathered thing looked more like a pigeon with a dull red, raggedy tail and battered wings. Part of its chest was bare, so you saw its belly moving in and out as it breathed. When I crouched down it lunged and hissed.

“Who’s this?” I asked, my voice hoarse.

“Her name is Tulip,” Tariq said. “She’s a Congo African Grey parrot.”

I wrote briefly about this wonderful book in an earlier post, if you’re interested in taking a look. I’m revisiting it to a) cheat and get another blog post for my Toastmaster’s project and b) cheat and get some details written down that I might want to talk about in my upcoming interview. Blogs: forums for public cheating.

I’ve already talked about why we all know who Christian Cooper is, which is because of his random encounter with a racist dog-walker in Central Park who decided being asked to put her dog on a leash was comparable to a death threat and returned the favour by offering to call the police and report that a “Black man was threating her life”. You know. A normal and not at all crazy reaction.

It’s possible that the crazy lady was the trigger for Christian Cooper to write this memoir, and if so, then I am begrudgingly grateful. Christian writes charmingly about his life, birding, his family, more birding, his dream job at Marvel Comics, and his spiritual quest to find what he dubs the Five-Way Road. As a self-described pagan, Christian is moved by two particular beliefs: the first is that the world we inhabit, Earth, can be seen as a living mother goddess; and the second is that the classic elements of earth, air, wind, and fire (corresponding to compass cardinals) can serve as a useful lens to focus and lead us towards understanding and connection. With this in mind, Christian decides to seek out the natural wonders of of the world that epitomize for him the spiritual centers of enlightenment representing the South, West, North, East, and Center.

This spiritual journey is interwoven with elements of his own life, and is peppered with related birding tips and his own list of the 7 pleasures of birding. As he travels the world, he almost always finds time to bird, and to meditate, and to reflect. Birding to Christian is a metaphor for life, but in one particularly memorable story, he instead uses the Star Trek episode “Amok Time” as a metaphor for the initial stirrings that cause birds to feel the pull of migration. On a personal note for me, many of the migrating species make stop-overs in Central Park, where Christian is often birding, also pass through PEPtBO where I then see them!

Birding Tip: First, find the bird with your naked eye; then, KEEPING YOUR EYES ON THE BIRD, bring the binoculars to your eyes – not the other way around!

One day, while birding, Christian hears the song of a Blackburnian Warbler, a zip zip zip zip tititi followed by an impossibly high pitched tseeeee, and he is determined to find and see the bird singing this song. A male Blackburnian Warbler is a gorgeous bird, with intricate black and white plumage and a flame-orange face and throat. Upon finally seeing the Warbler after a long period of searching, Christian decides that the only way to do justice to the magic of the moment is to create his own mythology about it.

The sun, after a day looking down on the the incredible array of life across the globe, arrived in the west so moved by all that it had seen that as it turned orange and sank toward the horizon it began to weep tears of joy. These flaming tears fell from the sky and briefly formed a lake of fire, and one small bird that had flown a vast distance to see the miraculous fire lake landed at its shore, exhausted. Overcome with thirst, it looked at the burning liquid of the lake and thought: “Such a gift should not go ignored.” And the brave bird took a drink.

From that moment on, the fiery liquid lodged in its throat, so that now it glows with the color of the setting sun. And when the firethroat sings, the last note slides high as the fire rises to try to return to the sky. And the joy of the sun at a world full of life is once more known to all those who look and listen.

If you like birds or the Marvel Universe, or Star Trek, or travel, or spiritual journeys, then this is the multi-faceted book for you!

Two Green Birds, by Geraldo Valerio

Francisco lives in Brazil and visits his Grandmother every day, helping her in the garden and then eating baked treats and drinking coffee (yes! coffee!) with her in her kitchen. One day, his Grandmother shows him a surprise – two green parakeets that have been given to her by a neighbour who knew of her love of birds. Francisco spends the next several days dreaming of the day that the parakeets fall in love with him and ride around on his shoulder and play with his hair. Unfortunately, his dreaming amounts to nothing as the two little parakeets refuse to eat and tremble in fear every time he comes near. Eventually Francisco figures out what the two (wild) parakeets need to be happy. It’s not difficult. I’m sure you’ve figured it out as well.

This is a children’s book, so it’s not trying hard to be subtle or nuanced. The lesson is about the same as getting hit in the face with a pie (which is what you deserve if you try to capture and domesticate a pair of wild birds). However! The story dips its toe into some of the reasons that birds, and other animals, have been mistreated around the world. In this case, it’s superstition (green birds bring good luck!) and misinformation (the Grandmother knows parakeets cannot live alone, but assumes having 2 in a cage is the answer to that problem). Ultimately, it’s the young boy who courageously accepts that he must release the birds to save them. Despite the obvious ending, the story was surprisingly sweet and moving. I highly recommend it for any young child.

A cute moment from this book. At one point, Francisco describes the parakeets as the “greenest birds he’s ever seen.” When I was volunteering this past summer during PEPtBO’s summer MAPS (Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship) program, I was extracting a few birds from a mosquito-infested location and I got a call on the walkie just to check up on how I was doing. At that exact moment, a bright blue bird* flew into the mist net in front of me so I answered “the bluest bird I’ve ever seen just flew into the net.” The banders have enjoyed reminding me of that several times over, to their great delight.

Grandma took me to the backyard. Hanging from the guava tree was a cage.

“Look at the gift I received yesterday,” she said.

In the care were two parakeets. They were very quiet, sitting on a perch. Their round eyes were black and watching. Their bodies were covered with smooth green feathers.

There were as green as fresh leaves, as green as the inside of an avocado, as green as the skin of a guava not yet ripe.

They were the greenest birds I had ever seen. Their round curved beaks looked like seashells.

Grandma looked at the cage and said “Precious! Precious! Precious!”

“Grandma, my father told me that if you see a green bird, it is a sign that something good is going to happen. He said green birds bring you good luck.”

“And now I have two green birds,” Grandma said. “I’ll have twice as much good luck.”

*It was an Indigo Bunting, and it absolutely was the bluest bird I have ever seen!

Night Owl Night, by Susan Edwards Richmond, Illustrated by Maribel Lechuga

I have set myself a challenge to write 8 blog posts this month. This amounts to 8 times more than my current running average*. I have a couple of reasons, which are conspiring to be extremely complimentary.

First, I am a member of the Belleville chapter of Toastmasters, working through Level 4 of “Presentation Mastery”. For my second of three Level 4 projects, I have chosen to “Write a Compelling Blog” which requires me to write 8 blog posts in a month (I’ll leave it to you to judge the ‘compelling’ part). The only time I’ve ever come close to 8 posts in a month has been when we’ve been travelling, and as we have no vacation travel plans in the foreseeable future, I need another angle.

The angle: I am on the Board of Directors of the Bird Observatory where I also volunteer during banding season, and I have been invited to be interviewed by the County radio station in late November to recommend several books about birding that might make fun Christmas gifts. I’ll be recommending a total of 7 books and providing a synopsis of each. Since 7 is awfully close to 8, I decided to write a separate post about each of the books which will a) help prepare me for the interview and b) check several boxes on my Toastmasters project. Win Win!! Or, Lazy Lazy!! You pick.

Night Owl Night is the first of my book recommendations, a beautifully illustrated children’s book that explains the process of and science for banding Northern Saw-whet Owls. When I stumbled across this book in our local bookstore (Books & Company) I was amazed!

I wrote about bird banding back in March, and you can read about it here if you like. Owl banding is very similar except that it’s colder and darker because we band at night. The process of owl banding is EXACTLY how this book describes it. Out of curiosity, I did a bit of research and it turns out the author is a birder, naturalist, and teacher who lives in Massachusetts. Fun fact: Massachusetts is where one of our recaptured adopted owls showed up. So many worlds colliding!

The story in this book focusses on a young girl who wants to be taken out owl banding by her scientist mother. This night, “Night Owl Night”, is her first time being allowed to join her mother as she bands Saw-whet owls. It explains the process of capturing owls in the mist nets, banding them, taking their measurements, and releasing them. It also gives a bit of extra detail on 4 different species of owls at the end of the story: Eastern Screech owls, Barred owls, Great Horned owls, and of course, Northern Saw-whets.

Then we hear a swish through the darkness. A blur. The second net is suddenly alive!

Gently, Mama unwraps a feathery ball. My heart twists and thumps. A saw-whet owl. Tiny. Perfect. We carry it back to the cabin.

In the cabin, as Mama holds the owl securely in her hands, it ruffles its feathers and claps its bill. “It’s okay, little one,” I whisper. “You’re safe with us.” When the owl hears my words, its bill grows still. It’s feathers relax. “You have a way with owls, Sova,” Mama says. My breath catches as we measure and weigh it. I gaze at the heart-shaped face, at the speckles on the belly.

Mama fans out one of the owl’s wings, then shines a special black light on the underside of its feathers. “See the pinkish glow?” she says. “That means this owl hasn’t replaced any feathers yet. It’s young. This is its first migration.”

“Like me,” I say. “It’s my first owl migration, too.”

* if you are one of my five followers then I apologize in advance for the many alerts you are going to receive this month

Back in June I made the excellent decision to retire – good god I’m old – from the best job I’ve had in my entire 30+ year career. I have many things to say about not working in shitty jobs that undermine your self esteem and your self worth, but that’s for another time. When I retired, one of my favourite coworkers gave me this book, an incredibly thoughtful gift. It’s not a start-to-finish book for reading, but more of a carefully curated collection of interesting birds of North America, complied by David Sibley, one of the preeminent writers and illustrators in the field of ornithology. That said, the beginning of the book is a presented like story, collating bird facts such as how they fly, why they are colourful, how they reproduce, and what to do if a bird hits your window* or gets trapped in your house.

Here are some of the more interesting tidbits that I came across:

1. The colour of birds can be produced either by pigments or because of the nanostructure of the surface of feathers. See point #2…
2. There is no blue pigment in birds. I’ll say that again. None of the blue colours you see in any bird anywhere in the world is the result of pigment. Blue colour arises solely due to the microscopic structure of feathers. Simply put, feathers are structured such that blue light reflects off multiple surfaces in a way that causes the wavelengths to align in the same phase and add together, while all other colours reflect out of phase and cancel out. This is why you “see” blue even though there is no blue pigment. Crazy!
3. The Blackpoll Warbler is the long-distance migration champion, travelling as far as 11,000 km (7,000 miles) between Alaska and central Brazil each spring and fall.
4. Not all birds’ bills are rigid. The tip of a sandpiper’s bill can “flex” in order to grasp prey buried in sand or mud. Like lips. I find this extremely weird and kind of freaky.
5. The Common Loon needs a large stretch of open water to fly, because it needs to take a long running start in order to take off in flight. They can actually become trapped if they land in a pond that is too small!
6. Feathers can have growth bars similar to tree rings! The bars alternate between subtly lighter and darker lines, with each dark-light combination indicating a single 24-hour period of growth. Darker bands grow during the day, and lighter bands at night.

A whole bunch of things about birds are still a mystery!

1. Why do some birds hops and some birds walk?!
2. Murres commonly dive in the ocean to 600 feet or more to find fish. Nobody knows how they find fish at that depth, or even survive!
3. Birds radiate heat through their bills so bird with bigger bills live in warmer climates. Except Puffins. How do Puffins survive in very cold water with such large bills? Unknown!

And finally, a fascinating tale about Chimney Swifts, a threatened species in Ontario:

The high, sharp twittering of Chimney Swifts is a common sound over eastern towns in the spring and summer, but you will never see one perched. These remarkable birds spend the entire day high in the air, and spend the night clinging to the walls inside a chimney. Before the advent of chimneys, they roosted and nested in large, hollow trees, or even on the bark of large trees protected by an overhanging limb. Exactly how they spend their winters is not known. Once they start migrating in September to the wintering grounds in South America, it’s possible that they stay in the air for the entire time, until they return to their nesting chimney the following April. Recent research has documented that some other species of swifts stay airborne, flying continuously, for up to ten months. How and when they sleep is still unknown, but a study of frigatebirds showed them flying continuously for weeks at a time, and that the time spend sleeping each day during continuous flight was only 6 percent of the daily sleep they get when they can perch. Like other birds, they can sleep one side of their brain while the other side is still alert, but flying frigatebirds actually spend about one-quarter of their sleep time with both sides of the brain asleep!

* You can choose to prevent birds from hitting your windows at all by purchasing and installing these feather-friendly collision prevention dots on the outside of your windows. These dots break up reflections that cause birds to strike windows in the first place. You can also hang strings, decorate your windows with soap, or apply your own decals but these options must be no more than 2 inches apart. I’m passionate about this, and I apologize in advance for how many times you are going to hear me talk about it.

In my mind, this book was stacking up to be a dry treatise on the scientific orders* of owls (Tytonidae, the barn owls, and Strigidae, all the other owls). Case in point, it is subtitled “The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds.” Now don’t get me wrong, I love a good science-y book as much as the next nerd, but I have to be in the right mood to read one, and when this book came up in my To Be Read (TBR) list, I just wasn’t. But I couldn’t slide it back into the bottom of the pile because the bird observatory, where I now sit as a board member, had arranged a Webinar presentation with the author and I was facilitating the afterward Q&A. So, I had no choice but to just put on my science-reading hat and get to it.

Surprisingly, this is the least science-y science book! Ackerman shares amazing personal stories of people who dedicate their time to the study of owls, either as a career or as volunteers. Her stories range from people who have studied owls all of their lives, to people who fell into owling through serendipity, to owls themselves who live in captivity (due to an inability to survive in the wild) and have become ambassadors of learning.

In my favourite story, she introduces us to Marjon Savelsberg, a classically training musician who studied with members of the Johann Strauss Orchestra. When Marjon developed breathing and muscle control problems, and was subsequently diagnosed with Idiopathic Cardiomyopathy, she was forced to abandon her musical dreams. After a period of despondency, she found her way to a research group studying owl vocalizations and has become an expert on Eurasion Eagle Owl, being able to identify individual owls by their particular calls. It is her innate musical talents that makes it possible for her to differentiate even the most subtle differences in owl calls, and has given her a new lease on life.

In another story, owl scientists figured out that they can locate owl roosting and nesting sites by using “detective dogs”, increasing their success rate from 59% to 87%. And in very remote areas, drones are being used to help locate particularly elusive owls. Locating owls helps scientists monitor populations and behaviours.

Ultimately this book was a joy to read and I recommend it to anyone. If you don’t already love owls to death, you surely will after reading it.

It’s late summer in the southern Appalachian Mountains. A narrow trail winds between oaks and hickories tinged yellow and, higher up, through spruces, pines, and firs. No owls in sight, but I know they’re here. These woods are full of them. Barred, Great Horned, Eastern Screech, and now – I realize – Northern Saw-whets.

Owls have changed the way I see this landscape, the snags and felled trees not as debris but as nurseries and ramps for branching owlets, the scrubby gullies not as ecological wastelands but as hide-aways for roosting owls. I think I spot a screech owl nestled in a snag, but it’s only a stubby broken limb doing a credible owl imitation. Ha! Turnabout is fair play.

I stand and listen. It’s daytime. The owls are quiet. They see me but stay unseen, so well hidden t hey escape my eye, even thought they may be yards away.

Writing this book has grown my wonder at these birds. Owls see what we don’t see. Hear what we don’t hear. Invite us to notice sights and sounds that might otherwise go unnoticed. With their quiet, subtle presence and cryptic coloring, they point to the value of not standing out in the world but fitting into it. For owls, invisibility is a defense or a disguise; for us, it’s a privilege, on that – if we’re lucky – my yield an owl sighting.

*as in “Kingdom Phylum Class Order Family Genus Species”, not as in “One Two Three Four Five …”