Mark Lynch
People are passionate about birds for a wide variety of reasons, including birds as the focus of an avocation (birding), as the subject for scientific research (ornithology), as sustenance (chicken tenders), for sport (pigeon racing), as the subject of poetry (The Raven by Poe), and even as the protagonist for a horror movie (The Birds, directed by Hitchcock). Here are two books with very different, yet still very passionate, celebrations of birds: the scientific and the personal.
New Perspectives in Ornithology: 21st Century Dispatches Across the World of Birds.
Edited by Scott V. Edwards and J. Michael Reed. 2025. New York: Oxford University Press and Nuttall Ornithological Club.
Last year was the 150th anniversary of the Nuttall Ornithological Club and, to commemorate that event, this book was published. The two editors, Scott V. Edwards and J. Michael Reed, compiled a series of 26 papers that celebrate and describe the current state of the science of ornithology. Edwards is the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology at Harvard University and Curator of Ornithology at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. Reed is Professor of Biology at Tufts University. People in Reed’s lab work on a variety of problems related to “the distribution and persistence of species, mostly birds, on human-altered landscapes” (from the overleaf author description). Having talked with both of these academic experts, I can say they bring two different perspectives and attitudes to bear on this project. They are both enthusiastic boosters for the science of ornithology and members of the Nuttall Ornithological Club.
This book, which celebrates the 150th anniversary of the Nuttall Ornithological Club (NOC), the oldest bird club in the United States, capitalizes on and draws strength from the widespread popularity of ornithology among scientists and the broader public. Founded in 1873, the NOC survives today as an active group of birders and bird enthusiasts with a strong interest in natural history, biodiversity, and conservation of birds. (p. 2–3)
A short overview of the history of the club follows.
In the Introduction, Edwards and Reed begin by making the case that the science of ornithology is the place to be if you want to study the natural world.
The field of ornithology is perhaps as vibrant now as it has ever been. Birds are widely recognized today as being one of the best-known clades of organisms on Earth; although many species of birds are still poorly known, we likely have on average more information per species and more publications per year for this group as a whole than for many other groups of organisms (except, of course, humans). (p. 1)
Take that, herpetologists!
Edwards and Reed go on to explain why so many researchers gravitate to the study of birds: because birds are all over, relatively easy to observe, and have lots of cool behavior.
Maybe the popularity of birds among scientists belies an inconvenient truth: that many scientists gravitate towards birds precisely because they are easy to study. Call it laziness or the scientific path of least resistance, birds are indeed more convenient to study than many groups of organisms. For others of us, their intriguing combination of traits—egg laying, a toothless beak, yet homeothermic and covered by that most extraordinary evolutionary innovation, feathers—makes them irresistible as study subjects. As a counterpoint to their ease of study and seeming ubiquity, it is also that birds are widely recognized as sensitive indicators of the health of the planet. (p.1)
Take that, ichthyologists!
The idea of putting together a series of papers on the current state of a science would seem to be a daunting task, and it was. Edwards and Reed used the older publication Perspectives in Ornithology (Brush and Clark, Jr. 1983) as a model and jumping-off point. That book was also a collection of essays presented for the centennial of the American Ornithologists Union. Edwards and Reed decided to focus on the ways the science of ornithology has progressed since that 1983 overview. One of the main differences is that all sciences have progressed since the 1980s because of the use of sophisticated technology, particularly digital information processing.
Scaled-up use of museum collections and vast stores of digital environmental metadata allow detailed understanding of the connections between avian distributions, migration, and habitat variation in space and time. New fossils of dinosaurs and Mesozoic birds, many from China and known to science only in the past two decades, are transforming our understanding of the origin of birds from theropod dinosaurs (Xu et al. 2014). The transformation of ornithology by new technologies and discoveries in the past few decades is nothing short of breathtaking. These topics, and many more, are covered in detail in this volume. (p. 5)
Another way in which ornithology has changed over forty years is the concerted effort to become more inclusive and diverse. Most sciences are currently at least paying lip service to the reality that, up until recently, research science has been the province of mostly white men.
Although the need for increased diversity in ornithology has been articulated by groups such as the American Ornithological Society (a merger of the former American Ornithologists Union [AOU] and Cooper Ornithological Society), it is no stretch to claim that calls for increased diversity in ornithology have multiplied exponentially in their number and urgency since the murder of the African American George Floyd by a white policeman in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020. Ornithology as a discipline was, like many scientific societies, including the NOC, heavily male dominated for most of its history. (p. 4)
Edwards and Reed have made a serious effort in New Perspectives in Ornithology to correct past inequities. They solicited papers from authors from around the world, thus making this a book with a truly global perspective. Furthermore, almost 50% of the authors are women.
The layout of New Perspectives in Ornithology is simple. The book is divided into five sections. Each section is prefaced with a general “Commentary” essay that is an overview of that subject. These sections are “Ecology” (p. 11–93); “Evolution” (p. 97–243); “Behavior” (p. 247–355); “Databases and Citizen Science” (p. 359–429); and “Conservation and Management” (p. 433-559).
The variety of topics of these essays is mind-blowing. There are papers on invasive birds, bird song, bird color, the distribution of birds in the neo-tropics, how to get a diverse group of people involved in local conservation efforts, the importance of citizen science, migration, the latest technology used in monitoring birds, how climate change could alter how we monitor birds, and much more. There is even an essay on the management of tropically adapted chickens! New Perspectives in Ornithology is a unique book that gives a broad sense of what is happening in the science now and how that science has changed in the last three decades. Mission accomplished.
All that said, it is understandable that birders might shy away from a book so based in the hard science of birds. After all, this is not a book geared to the identification of birds in the field or a where-to-find-birds book. But even if you are only interested in augmenting your list of species, remember it is what is now being discovered about the evolution, distribution, and behavior of birds that leads to the changes in your list. All of these topics are included in New Perspectives in Ornithology. Like all books of this type, it is not intended to be read cover to cover. Find an essay that sounds interesting and read that. The authors and editors have made a real effort to make the essays accessible to the general reader.
Congratulations to Edwards and Reed for pulling this important book together, and congratulations and Happy Birthday to the Nuttall Ornithological Club, which co-published the volume with Oxford University Press.
Literature Cited
- Brush, A. H., and G. A. Clark, Jr. (editors). 1983. Perspectives in Ornithology. Cambridge U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
The Company of Owls.
Polly Atkin. 2024. London: Elliott and Thompson LTD.
“I choose the company of owls.” (p. 25)
Polly Atkin is a British poet and non-fiction writer, nature writer, and academic. She grew up in Nottingham but now resides in an historical house in Cumbria and the dreamy English Lake District.
All of which sounds ideal, and it is, except that Atkin is chronically ill and is sick or in pain often. She finds the comparative isolation of the natural world that surrounds Grassmere, her home, to be comforting and supportive.
Like many disabled people, I knew at that time I was safer enclosed and contained, in a world in which others are similarly contained. Like medieval mystics in their anchorages, my mind was on the long-term rewards of short-term sacrifices. I found myself embracing solitude for a higher purpose: not holiness, but haleness, wholeness. Health. Long-term survival. Our unique and united mortal souls. (p. 25)
She and her partner discovered a family of Tawny Owls that regularly visit Grassmere and the town common, and Polly became instantly fascinated by their habits and vocalizations. In the beginning she admits she is no expert on owls but starts to amass a lot of information on these owls as well as other owl species in Britain. At one point, Atkin makes a concerted effort to view Short-eared Owls.
My knowledge is casual, accidental, filtered through pop culture and literature and entirely tempered by partiality. Because I love my neighbors, the owls, I love them and I want you to love them too. (p. x)
Each sighting of one of the owls propels her to learn more. All the while, she does considerable meditation on her condition in relation to the natural world she loves.
Sometimes I am so aware of my onlyhood, my apartness, I feel it like a shell around me. I don’t know if anyone can hear me through it, can see me through it. Sometimes living in my hyper-sensitive, hyper-aware, hyper-flexible Ehlers-Danlos body, I feel like I need a hard shell to move through the human world, with all its noise and light, all of its fervid activity. It is more comfortable to be in the woods or in the lake. (p. 49)
The Company of Owls is a deeply personal view of the experience of being handicapped yet still wanting to be a part of the out-of-doors. The poetic writing elevates this memoir above most stories about humans and the birds they love. Because of Atkin’s literary interests, there are many references to the long list of writers and other historical personages that have lived in the Lake District. Her writing also conveys a deep sense of place that adds to the pleasure of this book.
One of Atkin’s previous books is Some of Us Just Fall: On Nature and Not Getting Better. This book is a memoir of how she finally got correctly diagnosed after decades of frustrating meetings with doctors of all sorts who misdiagnosed her at every turn. Her childhood consisted of a long list of falls and broken or injured limbs. Some of Us Just Fall is also an exploration of what it is like to be a person who has a complex and painful disorder that will never get better, but who is nonetheless trying to get on with their life. This book will help the reader to understand how Atkin became the writer and nature lover she is today.
As a person with a serious and painful chronic illness myself, I find The Company of Owls the perfect book to get lost in after reading too many ornithological papers.
Literature Cited:
- Atkin, P. 2024. Some of Us Just Fall: On Nature and Not Getting Better. Los Angeles: The Unnamed Press.
To listen to Mark Lynch’s interviews with these authors, recorded for WICN (90.5 FM), go to these links.
<https://wicn.org/podcast/scott-v-edwards-j-michael-reed/>
<https://wicn.org/podcast/polly-atkin/>