Jonathan Rosen

"Looking for an ivory-bill…takes the mediating nature of birdwatching to an even higher level, because in this case the quarry is a kind of ghost bird, a creature that does and does not exist."

I used this quote from Jonathan Rosen's wonderful book to begin my own. It seemed like the perfect way to sum up all that has become the mythos of the ivory-bill.

To say Rosen’s “The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature” is a book about birding is like saying the Queen Mary was a boat. Well yes it was, or is, but it is so much more.

At its core is the author’s newfound love of birding, which the New Yorker practices in Central Park. It’s a spiritual connection to birds and nature or as he cites famed biologist E.O. Wilson, a “biophilia,” the love of life.

Through the book’s series of connected essays, Rosen also manages to trace the history of our relationship to birds through the writings and lives of literary and historic figures: Audubon, Thoreau, Darwin, Wallace, Dickinson, Whitman, Faulkner, Theodore Roosevelt, to name a few.

But to balance these spiritually uplifting sentiments, Rosen weaves in a cloud of melancholy. The book begins and ends with the story of the ivory-billed woodpecker, a bird that he points out “does and does not exist.” Is it extinct or not? And if it is extinct, what does that say about us?

“The Life of the Skies” is a positive title, but his darker subhead “Birding at the End of Nature” is the real crux of his work or his woes. As anyone who loves birds already knows, species are disappearing all over the world. The author uses a line from poet Robert Frost to bring this point home: “What to make of a diminished thing.” Indeed. What do we make of a truly diminished natural world? The America of Audubon is gone. In the closing day's of Jim Tanner's search for the ivory-billed woodpecker, he too realized that their world—large tracts of old forested swamps in the South—were also almost gone.

How SHOULD we feel, loving a thing that does and does not exist?

Excellent book.

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