“Everyone is a birdwatcher, but there are two kinds of birdwatchers: those who know what they are and those who haven’t realized it yet.” So begins The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature, Jonathan Rosen’s investigation into not only the history of bird watching but into its very underlying spirit. While others have previously produced histories of the activity, anthologies of its artistic creations both written and pictorial, and veritable libraries full of instructional guides, Mr. Rosen, an accomplished novelist and presently the editorial director at Nextbook, has in this present work given the bird watching community a portrait of itself that discloses many of its deeper psychological aspects that have been too often missed by previous authors.
What does it say about us that we watch birds? Rosen delves deep into that question. Centering much of the investigation and discussion around E.O. Wilson’s theory of biophilia, the idea that humans evolved as creatures deeply enmeshed with the intricacies of nature, and that we still have this affinity with nature ingrained in our genotype, Rosen extrapolates from his own experience. Living in the center of one of the world’s largest metropolitan areas, New York City, he discovered bird watching for himself in Central Park. However his bird watching activities have since drawn him far afield, from the swamps of Arkansas in search of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker to the wadis of Israel in search of the birds of the Old World.
This in itself is the central idea of The Life of the Skies: that the remnants of what once was a lively and vibrant natural world draw us, through the technology we have created and by the power it gives us, back into nature. From this we experience our deeply ingrained but too often forgotten connection to it. Humans have watched birds for centuries, even millennia, but it is only through modern developments in optics, radio telemetry, and transportation that we are able to learn anything more about them than the most rudimentary aspects of their lives. Yet these same developments have been made possible through the exploitation and too often destruction of species and habitats. For example, in order to save the world from Hitler’s Fascism and preserve the freedom of people to engage in such activities as the study of nature, the last known tract of land on which the Ivory-billed Woodpecker lived was logged to produce materials supporting the war effort. Such is the irony of our modern relationship to the natural world and the appeal of such reconnecting activities as bird watching.
Throughout the The Life of the Skies, Rosen draws liberally upon the lives and discoveries of some of the great naturalists of history, from Audubon and Darwin to Alfred Russell Wallace and Gilbert White. He also includes much from the lives and works of many of the great poets and philosophers who made nature a central part of their works, especially Dickinson, Thoreau, and Frost. The result is a kaleidoscopic journey through the often ironic and contradictory relationship of humans to the natural world, represented most prominently by birds. Truly, this is a book that will be oft quoted and long remembered in the literature of natural history.
Title: The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature
Author: Jonathan Rosen
Format: trade paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: Picador (Macmillan)
Publication Date: December, 2008
ISBN10: 0-312-42819-7
ISBN: 978-0-312-42819-8
This review was written for the original hardcover edition of the book (as published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, ISBN-13: 978-0374186302) and first appeared 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 it was provided gratis to the reviewer by the editorial staff of that magazine.
