Compiled by: Graeme Gibson
Doubleday Canada - 345 Pages
This book was given to me as a gift for birdsitting two delightful Cockatiels, Chelsey and Rainbow, while their owners were on vacation three years ago. In taking the title at face value this book became my bedtime reading for awhile. More about that later. I had not read anything by this well-known and highly respected Canadian author and avian enthusiast. This was the perfect time to do so.
The inside cover of the book says that, "...Gibson has spent fifteen years collecting the literary and artistic forms our affinity for birds has taken over the centuries." I can well believe that. The Bibliography, alone, is more than eight pages long and the Image Acknowledgements, ten. Few pages contain only one art form and/or literary style. From page to page this book challenges our knowledge, beliefs and reason.
The illustrations and literary excerpts and art forms span the centuries from undated folklore and myths through the twentieth century, as well as six continents. Quotes, excerpts, poems and stories are amply illustrated. Related sketches, photos, paintings and art objects, themselves, represent the centuries and countries of the world. All this is organized into nine chapters or "habitats" as the author has designated them, each seeming to represent an aspect of our relationship with birds:
1. "Birds observed and recorded." Did you know that, "Audubon...once wrote that he felt
incomplete if he didn't kill a hundred birds a day."? This in the name of science.
2. "How long have we been enchanted by birds? Forever it seems." This section contains mainly
prehistoric myths and stories. For example. "Cranes" from the early 14th century Peterborough
Bestiary, tells of how Cranes, as night sentries, hold little stones in their claws to stay awake.
3. "Folk tales and parables." Some like the Afro-American folktale by Abrahams called Fasting
for the Hand of the Queen's Daughter, left me a bit bewildered. In this tale a pigeon and an owl
fast in a contest to win the Queen's daughter. The owl dies of starvation. The pigeon cheats by
eating when no one is watching, wins the contest and lives happily ever after. Hmmmm. I wonder
what Aesop would have to say about this.
4. "Bird companions." The poetry and excerpts in this section demonstrate a companionship that I
would loosely define as birds found in the vicinity of people, as in the Skyhawk that gets
entangled in a ship's flag as the ship sinks (from Moby Dick by Herman Melville).
5. "Sinister auspices." Here birds are seen as being associated with superstition, misfortune, bad
luck, predictions, premonitions and prophesy.
6. "Correspondences and transformations." I might have understood this section better were I
more sophisticated in my appreciation of poetry. Frankly, unless blatantly simple, I don't
understand it.
7. "Birds we use, eat, wear and sell." For this animal lover and caregiver to small flock of parrots,
this chapter destroyed any remaining naiveté I might have had about the lengths to which the
human race will go to satisfy its vanity and whims. I still can hardly believe the numbers
represented in just these few pages: i.e. 15,000 Hummingbirds from Trinidad, per week, stuffed
and exported to hatters and dressmakers of Europe. 80,000 Mano killed to make one Hawaiian
cape of yellow feathers.
8. "Avian defence and flying nightmares." This is man's use of birds in his aggression against
others. I was horrified to read of ancient peoples like Genghis Khan tying "...flammable material
to the tails of the birds and cats and ignited them. When the creatures were released, they fled
home, setting each city on fire..." (Incendiary birds by Adrienne Mayor).
9. "Birds and the nostalgic human soul." This chapter contains the poem by Thomas Hardy called
The Darkling Thrush. It certainly spoke to me and I enjoyed it very much.
The Bedside book of Birds is really quite lovely and puts me in mind somewhat of a coffee table book that you can pick up, read a little and look at the illustrations, and put down at will without losing the gist or momentum. And it's beautifully designed. It's factual and historically valuable. There are some wonderful images conjured up by some of the excerpts and passages. However, contrary to the impression given by the book's cover and introduction, the contents do not reflect a relationship between man and birds characterized by admiration, fascination and intrigue, but one characterized by ignorance, cruelty and exploitation.
That brings me back to my comment earlier about my bedtime reading. The Bedside Book of Birds is not a bedtime book. After several nights of troubled, fitful sleep, I abandoned this book. Scenes of two day old chicks having their legs broken deliberately, a plucked rooster left in the sun to go mad, a pigeon having its eyelids sewn shut, for example left me with nightmares. It was a year later before I decided that the contents of this book were important enough that I would start reading it again with the full knowledge of what lay in its pages. I again found many of the images disturbing. However, perhaps they need to be disturbing, to shake us from our complacency in the face of practices just as ignorant, cruel and exploitative today.
Published in Good Bird Magazine Summer 2009
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