When Pete and Linda Dunne stepped out their back door into the cold New Jersey pre-dawn of New Year’s Day, 1989, they were taking the first step into a year-long birding journey that would take them across North America, reach its conclusion on the prairie in Baldwin City, Kansas, and be chronicled in one of Dunne’s most well known and beloved books – The Feather Quest: a North American Birder’s Year. Eighteen years later, we meet the Dunnes once again on the American prairie, this time on the Pawnee National Grasslands near Briggsdale, Colorado. It’s Groundhog Day and they are just beginning a journey that will be chronicled in Prairie Spring: A Journey Into the Heart of a Season – a work that, while confined to a shorter frame of time, exceeds The Feather Quest in both depth and aspiration, and should justly be regarded as one of Dunne’s finest works to date.
In the spirit of the great American natural history writer Edwin Way Teale, Pete Dunne’s Prairie Spring chronicles the unfolding of a season; however Dunne goes deeper than Teale by depicting not only the life cycle of a season but of its interwoven relationship to a particular biome as well. Once one of the great wonders of the world, sufficient to momentarily steal the breath of the explorers who first encountered it and committed their reflections to writing (sadly, we have no such reflections from the first humans to encounter it), the great grasslands of central North America are today under pressure from a myriad of forces – mostly of human origin – and as a result are being steadily reduced in their size as well as their ecological complexity. However Dunne’s work is not a “gloom and doom” dirge; it is an invitation – an invitation to learn, discover, and even, so long as it is done respectfully, visit this marvelous world that so many of us live upon the very edges of but too often fail to appreciate or even acknowledge.
Those who have read Dunne’s previous works will be pleased to learn that his characteristic good humor – the subtle and wry as well as the blunt and intentionally blatant – is liberally incorporated into the narrative. It is generously woven throughout another Dunne trademark – his immense knowledge about the natural world. Not confining himself to the subject of birds alone, Dunne experiences, investigates, and expounds to the reader upon a wide range of topics from ecology to astronomy, from geology to botany, from phenomena as grand as thousands of cranes gathering for the evening on the Platte River to those as small as the sound of a single Horned Lark calling by a the side of a dirt road – even threads of anthropology, sociology, and spirituality can be found woven into the story.
In its totality, Prairie Spring is indeed the chronicle of a quest – but unlike Dunne’s earlier work, this one is a vision quest. In pursuing something as intangible as a season across the wind-swept grasslands of the prairie, Dunne may have very well succeeded in wading into the landscape’s twin streams of time and existence, and as a result perceived the connections of each participant, including humans, one to another. It is to our own great good fortune that the person who has thus succeeded in this quest is also such a superb narrator for its recounting.
Title: Prairie Spring: A Journey Into the Heart of a Season
Author(s): Pete Dunne, photographs by Linda Dunne
Hardcover; 288 pages
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication Date: March 19, 2009
ISBN-10: 0618822208
ISBN-13: 978-0618822201
In accordance with Federal Trade Commission 16 CFR Part 255, it is disclosed that the copy of the book read in order to produce this review was provided gratis to the reviewer by the the editors of Bird Watcher’s Digest, the publication in which the review was originally published.
