Tim Gallagher's narrative of the rediscovery of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker,Grail Bird, was one of the more exciting books on ornithology that I've read in a long time. (One doesn't usually think of birds and excitement at the same time - which is a shame.) I reviewed that title in July 2005 for Bookslut and thought it was a great introduction to not only birds in general, but specifically US ecologic history. Here is what Tim told me back then about the bird and why he had to go after it when news came out of its rediscovery:
When I spoke with Tim Gallagher about writing The Grail Bird and finding the woodpecker, he told me that, “it was a dream come true” and perhaps more than anything, “He just didn’t want to give up on the dream.” I was interested, though, to hear him say that several people over the years had in fact seen the bird; they just had not been believed. As he recounts in his book there have been a lot of dismissed sightings in the past fifty years and it was partly because of this pattern that he decided to write The Grail Bird. “I took a chance with my career,” he said, “but I wanted to know why people were still fascinated with this bird. I went to places where people had seen it, talked to the people who made the sightings and spent a month traveling across the South.” He initially started gathering information for the book in 2001 but it was not his top priority, not until he was alerted about kayaker Gene Sparling, who saw an amazing bird at Bayou de View in the Arkansas Cache River National Wildlife Refuge. After speaking directly with Sparling, Gallagher was convinced that he had a credible woodpecker sighting and he was off to Bayou de View and on the road to history.
Tim followed Grail Bird up with a recent release, Falcon Fever about his long personal association with falconry. It is also a travelogue, a look at the life of Frederick II (one of the historic leaders in the field) and a very emotional coming-of-age story about his life with a difficult father, the time he served in jail as a teen on drug charges and his long and successful career on birds and birding. (He is currently with Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology.) I will be reviewing Falcon Fever in February as part of my celebration of Charles Darwin and natural history and plan to cross post at Guys Lit Wire. It's an excellent book for teens in particular as it shows how you can love something from a young age that will never leave you, and you can also make a mistake or two along the way but they won't derail you.
Here are some of the titles Tim enjoyed this year:
____________________________________________________________________
Most of the books I read (and write) these days tend to be narrative nonfiction. I don’t know exactly what it is about this form that appeals to me—I guess I’m just fascinated by well-written stories about real people and events. As long as they have a strong narrative arc and compelling characters, I’m hooked. I’m also a history freak, and this form lends itself well to interesting depictions of other times and places.
But I don’t like textbook-style writing, reducing historical events into a meaningless recitation of names, dates, and places—the kind of thing bored high school students have to memorize. I want to read books that fully evoke the time and place being covered; I want to read about strong, unique characters, famous or not. The three books I’m discussing here all meet those criteria.
The Snoring Bird: My Family’s Journey through a Century of Biology by Bernd Heinrich: Don’t let the title fool you: this book is far from being a sleeper. Heinrich is well known for his natural history accounts—such as Ravens in Winter and In a Patch of Fireweed—that blend personal narrative with fascinating natural history accounts and research. This book is different and to me is Heinrich’s most interesting and absorbing work. It’s a large book, nearly 500 pages long, but I absolutely couldn’t put it down.
Heinrich’s father, Gerd, is the dominant figure in the book, and a colorful character he is. In World War I, he is first a cavalryman but later joins the newly formed Luftwaffe and becomes an ace in the colorful days of dogfights in rickety biplanes, fighting alongside the likes of the Red Baron. He later also was forced to fight in World War II.
One of my favorite parts of the book was reading about Gerd’s idyllic life in his beloved Borowke—his family’s estate in what was then part of northeastern Germany (but is now in Poland) that probably hadn’t changed much since medieval times. There, in the early 20th century, people still worked the land with teams of horses and oxen and scythed the crops by hand. And everything the people on the estate ate and drank and the clothes they wore were produced right there; it was a completely self-contained, self-sustaining unit of society. It’s amazing that this feudal way of life survived at Borowke into the 20th century, before two world wars devastated everything.
Gerd was an avid, lifelong naturalist, who, with virtually no scientific training, became the world expert on Ichneumons—parasitic wasps that lay their eggs in live caterpillars, which are later devoured by the wasp’s young when they hatch. There wasn’t much funding available for wasp research, so Gerd offered his services to go on expeditions in faraway parts of the world, collecting mostly birds and other animals. He studied and collected wasps in these places in his spare time. He was sometimes away for a couple of years at a time, living in the wilderness.
Gerd was never a good husband—or father. I won’t dwell on his various indiscretions here, but he was an unabashed womanizer, who never felt any qualms about dropping everything to pursue a new lover—or to go exploring in another part of the world. Gerd once left Bernd and his sister in the care of an orphans’ school for a time so he and his wife could go on a lengthy expedition.
In one of the most harrowing sections of the book, in 1945, when Bernd was a young boy, he and his family had to flee the advancing Soviet army, which was sweeping through the countryside near Borowke, destroying everything in its path. And they barely escaped. This reads like an epic saga, and it’s all the more interesting because it’s true. They finally found refuge in a small cabin in the woods near Hamburg and lived in primitive conditions as refugees. Of course, for young Bernd Heinrich, it was a paradise, and anyone familiar with his other books can see how he came to be the man he is today, spending months at a time in his remote cabin in the wilds of Maine.
Dog Man: An Uncommon Life on a Faraway Mountain by Martha Sherrill: Now that I’m reviewing these books side-by-side, I see that Dog Man has a number of similarities with The Snoring Bird. Both books provide behind-the-scenes looks at wartime life in countries that were our enemies during World War II—Japan in Dog Man and Germany in The Snoring Bird. Both explore the life of an obsessive man who perpetually puts his own needs and desires above those of his wife and children. And in both, the central character spends substantial parts of his life in a harsh environment.
But in Morie Sawataishi’s case, his obsession is to save Japan’s ancient Samurai Akita dog breed from extinction. By the late 1930s, the breed had dwindled almost to nothing, but things got much worse during World War II. At the height of wartime deprivation and rationing, people considered it a frivolous extravagance to keep dogs for pets, especially large ones like Akitas. During this time, many Akitas were killed to provide fur linings for the winter coats of military officers. It reached the point where dog owners had to hide their pets to avoid having them confiscated and killed.
Although Morie doesn’t chase other women as Gerd did, he is just as oblivious to the needs of his wife. Kitako was from a wealthy Tokyo family, and she loved the cosmopolitan world of the city, with its rich social life. Without a second thought, he moved her to the far north of Japan (a 22-hour train ride from Tokyo), to the snow country, where people were largely cut off from the rest of Japanese society, stoically enduring brutally harsh, lonely winters. This very much agrees with Morie’s solitary nature, but for his wife—and later, his children—it is hell on Earth.
Morie becomes fanatically obsessed with saving the Akita dogs. When he got his first dog, he and Kitako already had a toddler and an infant. It was difficult to obtain enough food to feed his family. How would they ever be able to feed a dog? And worse, Morie spent six month’s wages to buy the pup. Kitako wouldn’t talk to him for a week. And he had to keep the dog hidden, walking it only late at night and before dawn—praying that it would not bark and arouse attention. Once he gets one dog, there’s no stopping him, and he spends the rest of his life breeding Akitas. And yes, he does save the breed.
Martha Sherril’s spare, unadorned style of writing fits perfectly with the subject matter. She never injects herself into the narrative. She just steps back and lets the power of the characters and the material unfold.
The Legend of Colton H. Bryant by Alexandra Fuller: This is a different kind of book entirely from the others and reads more like poetry than nonfiction. Fuller’s prose evokes the stark beauty as well as the harshness of the Wyoming landscape. I love her description of the ubiquitous Wyoming winds: “There aren’t, but there should be, a hundred different words for wind in Wyoming; crop-burner, roof-lifter, barn-raiser, widowmaker. They say that one summer in 1968, up near Chugwater, the wind stopped blowing for a few moments and spooked the horses. And every year somewhere between Rawlins and Laramie, the wind flicks over a couple of freight cars on the Union Pacific line. Wind, day and night, taking the names of men, women, and children—you and you and you, the wind says—and picking them off one at a time. Off snowmobiles and oil rigs, off icy roads, it’s the wind. . . . Surely to be born to such a wind is to be half-given back to the earth. Untethered from the get-go.”
I’ve spent a lot of time in the areas she writes about—hunting sage grouse with trained falcons in the shadow of the Wind River Range and other areas—and I’ve seen the toll that natural-gas development, both ecological and human, is taking. Fuller wonderfully depicts the places and the people. In her vivid biographical sketches of Colton H. Bryant—a young natural-gas-field worker who was killed in an accident largely caused by company negligence—she captures the soul of the people in this sparsely populated state.
I’m not sure what the genesis of Colton Bryant was. Did Fuller just randomly pick a Wyoming gas-field worker who was killed in an accident and try to find out everything about his life? Did she take a newspaper headline and run with it, filling in his portrait, giving depth and substance and meaning to his demise so that we would feel the depth of his loss?
If so, she succeeded big time. And Colton Bryant was the perfect person for her efforts. He has a simplicity and good-heartedness that seem rare now. The depth of his feelings for his friends and family, his generosity and character, are like something from a long-lost time.
By the end of the book, you’d have to be a heartless monster not to grieve for this kid—or not to condemn the company that saved a couple of thousand dollars by failing to put up a safety rail that would have saved his life.
