Not so bird-brained after all
Our feathered brethren are more intelligent and skilled than we realise. Siobhan Harvey is impressed.
Jennifer Ackerman’s stunning ornithological study of life, The Genius of Birds, successfully sets the record straight on the world’s bird life. Birds as rudimentary, dumb, socially-dysfunctional life forms? Not according to Ackerman.
In this accessible academic tome, she mixes human study, science and travelogue to offer a life-affirming discourse on how our past, present and future is inextricably connected to our feathered friends.
Ackerman is a New York Times Editor’s Choice commended author; and on the strength of The Genius of Birds it’s easy to see why. Her writing is intricate, layered yet comprehensible, as this poetic opener to the first chapter, From Dodo to Crow: Taking the Measure of a Bird Mind, illustrates.
‘‘The woods are cool, dark, and mostly quiet except for the occasional birdcall from somewhere in the thick canopy above, a patchwork of emerald, lichen, avocado, and a dark, coppery, almost iridescent green.’’
If this is the specific, the minutiae, it stands as a testament to the quality of the prose at large. Along the way, not only does it evidence Ackerman’s incredible knowledge of her subject, but it infuses cadence, colour, detail and imagination into her act of storytelling, birds as deeply constructed characters in a work of fact-meets-imagination.
Given this is a book about birds, it’s hardly surprising to discover it’s a work which also thematically focuses upon flight.
Across the United States from rural Adirondack Mountains to urban Philadelphia and Louisiana, from Barbados to Palestine and onwards to northeast China, New Caledonia, the east coast of Australia, our very own Auckland and points in between, The Genius of Birds regards the habitats and habits of resident bird life.
In doing so a diverse array of avian occupants – herons, Bajan bullfinches, Pinyon jays, bowerbirds – are encountered, their settings arenas in which their social, private, artistic and adaptive practices are considered.
It’s here, in the travels undertaken, and the birds and their behaviours engaged with, that Ackerman is her cleverest. For where this is a book about journey, that journey is as much one taken by the reader’s mind as it is one undertaken by the author’s body and prose.
In detailing geographic and avian diversity, we are transported beyond a basic view of birds as peripheral creatures in a world shaped by our dominance, to an understanding and acceptance of our co-existence. Indeed, the knowledge formed by the reader throughout this book is of the bird’s greater diversity, resilience, aptitude and intelligence.
The Genius of Birds is a book with the power to resonate with readers well beyond the twitchers among us.