Birdology: Adventures with Hip Hop Parrots, Cantankerous Cassowaries, Crabby Crows, Peripatetic Pigeons, Hens, Hawks, and Hummingbirds

I love birding – actively finding, identifying, and watching birds. But there is so much more to these amazing feathered creatures than what you can glean from even the most intensive birding. That is why I also love reading about birds. Through books like The Private Lives of Birds, by Bridget Stutchbury, you can discover how birds live. But there is another layer still. Sy Montgomery delves into this – the “avian essence” – in Birdology: Adventures with Hip Hop Parrots, Cantankerous Cassowaries, Crabby Crows, Peripatetic Pigeons, Hens, Hawks, and Hummingbirds.

Montgomery’s goal with Birdology is “to restore both our awe and our connection to these winged aliens who live among us”. To do this, she focuses on seven birds, using each of them to explore a different aspect of this avian essence. The birds, and their associated concept, are:

• Chickens – Birds are Individuals
• Cassowary – Birds are Dinosaurs
• Hummingbirds – Birds are Made of Air
• Hawks – Birds are Fierce
• Pigeons – Birds Find Their Way Home
• Parrots – Birds Can Talk
• Crows – Birds are Everywhere

In the first chapter, the author introduces the hens that she keeps and their startlingly distinct personalities. In the second, we accompany the author to Australia as she searches for a cassowary, a bird right out of the Cretaceous. Hummingbirds has the reader visiting a hummingbird rehabber. The next chapter deals with falconry, followed by homing pigeons. The penultimate chapter discusses parrots and their cognitive abilities. Finally, Montgomery uses a large, urban flock of crows to demonstrate that birds are everywhere, yet threatened.

If you read that list closely, you’ll notice that only two of these deal with birds in the wild: cassowary and crows. To be fair, though, these hummingbirds and hawks are truly wild birds that are only being kept for a time. As a birder, I’m much more interested in wild birds than those in captivity. So it was no surprise that the cassowary chapter was my favorite. It’s a taut tale of the author’s search for a bird. Any birder can relate to that. Yet it also possesses an added element of danger that, thankfully, most birders do not have to deal with – the bird Montgomery was looking for could kill her. It’s true; cassowaries can, and do, kill people. Montgomery writes, “Friends at home wondered why I wanted to venture into the dark rain forest hoping to encounter a big black creature who might eviscerate me”. It may not have been the “normal” or “sensible” thing to do, but it sure made for some good reading.

However, I found myself far less interested in most of the other narratives. They are most definitely informative, but not interesting unless you are curious about the topic being discussed. And if these stories were all there were to the book, it would be an unconnected hodgepodge of tales without much to recommend it. But the author uses the stories as a framework, adroitly weaving a deeper thread into the narrative. She uses the specific subjects to introduce general concepts, all with the goal of getting the reader to see birds in a new light. So while I didn’t, and still don’t, have any interest in pigeon racing, for example, I did learn a good deal about the practice and, moreover, gained a deeper appreciation for birds in general.

It also helps that Montgomery is a great writer. Her prose is an easy, fun read.

Recommendation

In Birdology, Sy Montgomery explores a number of facets of birds and instills an awe of these fascinating creatures. This book will be most impactful for, and thus more highly recommended to, those who are not already extremely familiar with birds. But it’s still worth a read for anyone.