For the Birds

I have been browsing in The Bedside Book of Birds, edited by Graeme Gibson, which is the sort of book I periodically vow never to read again, at least until after I buckle down with Murasaki Shikubu’s The Tale of Genji. Then I weaken and read one entry and pretty soon I’m like the runaway slave in Faulkner’s “Red Leaves,” who can’t stop eating the ants walking past him on a log. In a beautiful stroke of anachronism, Faulkner even likens the ant-eating slave to a guest at a cocktail party inhaling the cocktail peanuts.

My trouble with the bird book – that is, my enjoyment -- started with the epigraph from John Ruskin:

“I have made a great mistake. I have wasted my life with mineralogy, which has led to nothing. Had I devoted myself to birds, their life and plumage, I might have produced something worth doing.”

Ruskin made plenty of mistakes in his life – pedophilia springs to mind – but collecting rocks was not among them. His complete works amount to 39 volumes, not counting letters and journals, so even by Victorian standards he was no lay about. His wishing he had taken up birds is like Melville regretting that he dropped those scrimshaw lessons.

The second epigraph is from Theodore Roethke – in this case, eight lines of refried Yeats – so I’ll spare you that, but the third is from the delightful Gilbert White (1720-1793), the English vicar best known for The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne:

“The language of birds is very ancient, and, like other ancient modes of speech, very elliptical: little is said, but much is meant.”

This is both good ornithological speculation (White was one of those gifted amateurs who, in the past, contributed so much to science) and very suggestive when applied to writing. Also, it makes me want to reread White.

Much of the rest of the book doesn’t rise to these elevated standards, I’m afraid. I don’t plan to read every selection --I do have to get started with Lady Murasaki – but Gibson includes too much folklore for my taste, probably in a misguided effort to achieve “diversity.” I don’t care about Micmac legends. Most of the worthy entries, some of them unexpected, come from writers we already know well and esteem -- Darwin, Bruno Schulz, Redmond O’Hanlon, Flann O’Brien, Mandelstam, even Elias Canetti. The choicest find, for me, is a writer named Charles Edward Douglas (1840-1916), identified as a Scot who explored New Zealand. His passage, hilarious in the midst of so much nature-solemnity, reminds me of Edward Abbey. It’s titled “The Mountain Kiwi”:

“I have very little to say regarding this bird, as I have only seen two of them, and being pushed with hunger, I ate the pair of them, under the circumstances I would have eaten the last of the dodo.

“It is all very well for science, lifting up its hands in horror, at what I once heard called gluttony, but let science tramp through the Westland bush or swamps, for two or three days without food, and find out what hunger is. Besides at the time, which was many years ago, I was not aware that it was an almost extinct bird. Had I known so, I would at least have skinned it and kept the head and feet.”

That’s a voice I can trust and I want to hear more of. The bibliography indicates Douglas’ words come from Mr. Explorer Douglas, published in 2000 by Canterbury University Press, N.Z.