Songbird Journeys: Four Seasons In the Lives of Migratory Birds

Explores the remarkable lives of migratory birds and answers such questions about songbirds as where do they go, how do they get there, and what do they do in the places that they inhabit throughout the year.

Each spring, millions of orioles, tanagers, thrushes, warblers and other songbirds travel thousands of miles from the tropics to their summer breeding grounds as far north as the boreal forests of Canada and in the fall return to their southern wintering grounds. Navigating by the stars, magnetic fields and polarized light patterns invisible to humans, the birds make their amazing journeys at night, flying in huge flocks that most of us never see. In this captivating debut, Chu, an ornithologist at Cornell, conveys the wonder of these migrations, following the birds through all four seasons and chronicling the efforts of scientists to track them with technology and their own ingenuity—trekking to distant locales, some even following, in cars and airplanes, individual birds outfitted with transmitters. Their heroic efforts are important, Chu points out, for only by understanding where the birds go can we learn how to preserve their habitats. To engage the general public in these efforts, she includes information on the best places to observe migrating birds and provides lists of citizen-science projects and resources for amateurs birders who want to contribute to the growing base of knowledge about bird migration. 8 pages of color illus. not seen by PW. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

One of the reasons we continue to destroy the natural world is that most of us still take its creatures and their habitats largely for granted. Birds, for instance, just somehow reappear each spring, cheerful and full of song as always. Except they don't, at least not always. Half a century ago, Rachel Carson foresaw a future with silent springs, and every year more research attests to our seemingly implacable march toward that ominous prospect.

Of course we all know this, at least in the abstract. What we mostly don't know is the incredible journey that brings our diminishing contingent of songbirds back to settle into their accustomed backyard haunts. What those pilgrimages entail -- where our familiar avian neighbors go for six months of the year -- is the subject of Miyoko Chu's Songbird Journeys.

Simply yet crisply written, Chu's work summarizes much of what has recently been learned about the multiple lives of songbirds. As they move from continent to continent with the seasons, the annual flight of tens of millions of these small, determined pilgrims may be the most gripping spectacle in all of nature, though few humans have seen it. Even those of us who have managed to join this aerial crusade (I once followed peregrine falcons to the Arctic and the American Tropics in a small Cessna) get only a glimpse of the saga.

Like John McPhee in his travels with geologists, Chu turns to the ornithological detectives to piece together the story. And while Songbird Journeys suffers from the fact that these observations are secondhand, Chu's researchers have truly great tales to tell. Dartmouth biologists Dick Holmes and Peter Marra, for example, describe how American redstarts -- whose flamed wings we see fluttering in our summertime shrubbery -- are present here often solely as the victors of a war waged against their own kind. Holmes and Marra found that dominant redstarts immediately nail down the richer food supply of humid mangrove stands in faraway spots like Jamaica -- which, by the following spring, gives them the strength to make the nearly 2,000-mile trip north early enough to claim the best breeding territories. Less forceful redstarts are pushed into dry scrub habitats that often fail to provide them with enough nutrition to fuel the long flight back north, much less to raise their young successfully once they get there.

This sort of research into their vanishing wintering areas is crucial if we want songbirds to survive, and Chu's fine stories leave one anxious for more. But too soon she flits off to pedestrian descriptions of the Cornell laboratory of ornithology, various citizen-science projects and lists of migration hotspots, complete with phone numbers and Web sites. By also sandwiching in lovely illustrations by painter Evan Barbour, an extensive index and a 14-page bibliography, Chu has created an intriguing, though perhaps overly ambitious, three-way hybrid of an Audubon Field Guide, a Peter Matthiessen ramble and a Fodor travel manual.

Club George goes to the opposite extreme. Like Thoreau at Walden Pond, Bob Levy examines in minute detail the lives of a small flock of New Yorkers -- feathered residents of Central Park and the equally colorful human observers who make these birds' lives the focus of their own.

Levy began recording his visits to Central Park during an unexpected period of unemployment. In excerpts from his diary, we follow his conversion from someone merely concerned about the environment to a man happily obsessed with birds. Over the course of a summer's worth of daily visits to Central Park, we meet the pivotal figure in Levy's transformation: a red-winged blackbird named George.

George, we are charmed to find, is famous. His flamboyant song-and-dance routine is so successful at cadging food from humans that he has constituents -- members of a floating group of admirers who refer to themselves simply as "Club George." The red-wing becomes his mentor because "after meeting George all succeeding birds looked to me like works of art." In this bold bird, Levy sees the innate resourcefulness of all his avian kind, plus something more: the way their indefatigable spirit generates a sort of loose family among the park's (sometimes clandestine) bird-feeding regulars.

With an articulate, introspective sensibility, Levy patiently observes the interactions between birds and humans. But he sometimes slips into glibness, employing gimmicks such as breaking his narrative with highlighted notices like this one: "WARNING: Look out. Here comes one more story of graphic violence." That is just way too clever. Unfortunately, it also evokes the preciousness of one of the bird-watchers, who dissolves into twitters upon seeing the everyday predation that sustains the natural world that the group reveres. Yet, like Songbird Journeys, Club George manages to evoke the existential optimism that birds inject into the life of anyone willing to open his or her soul to their dauntless, essential lightness of being.

Reviewed by Alan Tennant
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

*Starred Review* The wonder of bird migration has puzzled humans for centuries. Literally millions of birds all over the world make seasonal movements to and from their breeding grounds, some traveling a short distance while others fly thousands of miles. Our most familiar birds are the songbirds, whom we know well while they visit during the breeding season. But what is known about their lives during the majority of the year, when they are either traveling or on their wintering grounds? Chu, an ornithologist and science writer for the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, has written an impressive introduction to the study of birds on the move. Following the birds through the four seasons, she begins with spring as birds leave the shores of the Yucatan Peninsula for a nonstop flight across the Gulf of Mexico. Summer finds birds busily nesting and feeding young on the abundant food resources that are the ultimate reason for their migration. In autumn the reverse of the spring migration occurs, albeit more protracted as individual species finish breeding and go. In winter the birds have reinserted themselves into their off-season habitat, where they interact with an entirely different group of species from their summer neighbors. Chu examines the science of studying migration and peppers the text with anecdotes from field researchers. Each seasonal section ends with a list of hot spots for observing the birds in that phase of the cycle. Nancy Bent
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved