One of the true joys of both reading and bird study is the practice of simply doing it for unapologetic personal pleasure. In the world of books, the trend toward “utilitarian books,” those intended to impart to the reader some great secret that will improve their business, romantic life, or cholesterol levels has largely displaced many older genres that really made reading an enjoyable part of life. Of these, the miscellany has perhaps suffered most. Lacking a Puritanically measurable purpose, these wonderful collections of facts, literary snippets, personal reflections, and assorted other discoveries, despite being a bane to classification and stocking for the modern bookseller, are a genuine joy to read. Fortunately, the authors and publisher of Winged Wonders: A Celebration of Birds in Human History have defied this trend and given us all a gift for which we should be most grateful.
The authors, Peter Watkins and Jonathan Stockland, have within the pages of this jewel of a book managed to assemble some of the most fascinating information on sixteen commonly recognized birds, their respective genera and in some cases taxonomic families. Delving into sources as broadly diverse as ornithological texts, memoirs, poetry, religious texts and allegory, etymology, folklore, and music, Watkins and Stockland offer an insight into the ancient, complex, and in some cases even contradictory relationship between the bird in question and the humans around which they live. For example, the widely dispersed folk understanding of the wren being a happy and fortuitous bird yet formerly between St. Stephen’s Day and Twelfth Night hunted as metaphorical (but sadly all too individually real) punishment for its reputed culpability in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
In the tradition of that great bird watcher of yore, the Reverend Gilbert White (indeed, Watkins is more formally the Reverend Peter Watkins), author of A Natural History of Selborne (1789), Winged Wonders treats is subject with all the respect and dignity deserving of one of humankind’s greatest artistic and religious inspirations, yet at the same time manages to interweave a sense of enjoyment and mirth within the sometimes disparate, at other times interlocking, narratives. True mastery of subject and form is needed to achieve the transition from, for example, the legend of the “Good Friday Robin” to “Who Killed Cock Robin” to an eloquent selection about robins as seen from a countryside perspective as recorded in George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss. Watkins and Stockland clearly possess this mastery.
Erudite without being stuffy, scientific without being dry or tedious, playful without being flippant; Winged Wonders is, employing the eminent critic and editor James Mustich Jr.’s phrase, a “thumping good read.” Whether read languorously and intermittently as a nightstand companion, in one intense and unbroken afternoon, or anything in between, this is a book to which the reader, once completing a first reading, will time and again return for both enjoyment as well as reference.
Title: Winged Wonders: A Celebration of Birds in Human History
Authors: Peter Watkins and Jonathan Stockland
Hardcover: 224 pages
Publisher: BlueBridge
ISBN-10: 1933346078
ISBN-13: 978-1933346076
This review was originally published in Bird Watcher’s Digest. 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 editorial staff of that publication.
