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Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent, and Songbird Journeys: Four Seasons in the Lives of Migratory Birds
Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent, and Songbird Journeys: Four Seasons in the Lives of Migratory BirdsBookshelf -- December 2006
Published: October 20, 2006 Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent: The Importance of Everything and Other Lessons from Darwin's Lost Notebooks, by Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Little, Brown and Company, 2006, 276 pages, $24.95, hardcover.
Before Charles Darwin became the father of evolutionary theory, he was a birdwatcher. In Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent, birder and nature writer Lyanda Lynn Haupt describes his transformation to serious naturalist during and after his five-year voyage around South America.
When Darwin set foot on the HMS Beagle, he was a 22-year-old medical school dropout, enthusiastic about collecting birds and beetles, but he lacked rigorous scientific training. Haupt draws upon Darwin's ornithological diaries, taking us along as he watches condors, stilts, rheas, owls, and ovenbirds and gradually becomes a careful observer of the natural world.
Like many of us, Darwin began studying birds as a somewhat manic and careless collector of facts. His initial notes on tropical birds weren't impressive. By the time he reached the plains of southern South America, though, he was paying closer attention to birds, taking meticulous notes, and asking probing questions about what he was seeing. |
 Haupt's new book says that Darwin made only one note in his diaries about the different bill shapes and sizes of the finches of the Galápagos Islands.
Photo by ©John Gould
Haupt follows Darwin after his return to England and finds additional inspiration in the many years he spent documenting the discoveries from his voyage and studying barnacles, pigeons, and earthworms in attempts to better understand the process of evolution by natural selection. The man continued to question his observations and pursue every possible line of evidence, qualities that contributed to his greatness as a researcher.
I also enjoyed reading about Darwin's deep spiritual reverence for living things. Haupt seems to suggest that Darwin's views about our evolutionary relationship with other animals matured as he developed feelings of kinship with the rest of the natural world. I found myself attracted to his careful and caring approach to exploring nature and was surprised to realize that Darwin might serve as a spiritual, as well as a scientific, role model.
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Songbird Journeys: Four Seasons in the Lives of Migratory Birds, by Miyoko Chu, Walker, 2006, 312 pages, eight color plates by Evan Barbour, $23, hardcover.
The passage of billions of birds overhead each spring and fall is one of the greatest wonders of nature. In Songbird Journeys, Cornell Lab of Ornithology editor Miyoko Chu explores the mysteries of migration and the life histories of birds during the breeding, wintering, and migratory seasons.
Chu gives us glimpses of migration, focusing on a handful of species. She discusses the flocks of songbirds that stream across the Gulf of Mexico. She notes that individual thrushes beat their wings 3.2 million times during a single migratory journey, and she describes how birds' nerves allow them to sense, and possibly even see, the earth's magnetic field. And she considers the seldom-considered lives of "North American" birds as they spend most of the year in the company of antpittas, toucans, trogons, and other tropical birds.
But even more than a review of migratory songbird biology and life history, Songbird Journeys is an appreciation of the biologists and birders who have spent the last 50 years studying how birds migrate.
I found the strongest sections to be those where Chu introduces us to researchers: people stationed on oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, two men in a small airplane following a radio-tagged thrush through a late-night thunderstorm, bird banders who study birds on their wintering grounds in the tropics, and notable ornithologists Sidney Gauthreaux, Olin Sewall Pettingill, and others.
For those of us excited by the mysteries of migration and potential research adventures, Songbird Journeys serves as a useful guide. Travel instructions encourage birders to visit a few of the best locations from Alberta to Panama for observing migratory birds throughout the year. And Chu invites birdwatchers to help academic researchers by participating in the Christmas Bird Count, Project Feeder Watch, eBird, the Great Backyard Bird Count, and similar citizen-science programs, which provide vital information about bird populations and movements.
Rob Fergus coordinates backyard and community bird-conservation programs for the National Audubon Society.
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