The Bedside Book of Birds: An Avian Miscellany

By Graeme Gibson

Doubleday Canada

370 pages, $29.95 hardcover

 

Crows: Encounters with the Wise Guys of the Avian World

By Candace Savage

Greystone Books

113 pages, $27 hardcover

 

This season sees two new books that will delight devoted birders as well as readers with a more casual, backyard type of relationship with the avian world. For The Bedside Book of Birds, Toronto novelist Graeme Gibson has gathered a charmingly eclectic collection of stories about the relationships between birds and humans throughout the ages. He culls excerpts from the realms of fiction, non-fiction and poetry and presents them in nine whimsically arranged sections, including “birds we use, eat, wear and sell” and “avian defence and flying nightmares,” along with rich illustrations and photographs in this thick volume that is the perfect size for a bedside table.

Only a scant few of Gibson’s selections seem expected, such as Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Darkling Thrush” (“I leant upon a coppice gate/When Frost was spectre-gray,/And Winter’s dregs made desolate/The weakening eye of day.”) and the story of Noah’s dove from the Book of Genesis. For the most part, Gibson casts a much wider net. And because the bibliographic information appears at the end of each entry, part of the delight in reading through the collection is the surprise at discovering what comes next, whether it’s a selection from the journals of Marco Polo, in which he accompanies a squad of the Khan’s 10,000 royal falconers, or a short story from Haruki Murakami in which the cry of a bird alerts a young boy to mysterious night-time meetings outside his bedroom window.

What may surprise, and even disturb, readers the most are the number of entries concerned with the hunting of birds, whether by indigenous Hawaiians who once used feathers as currency (the yellow plumes of starlings being the most prized), or by Audubon himself who “once wrote that he felt incomplete if he didn’t kill a hundred birds a day” to find the perfect specimen on which to base his paintings. Still, such entries provide an important link in understanding our evolving relationship with birds, from revering them as mythological or spiritual icons to prizing them as stuffed showpieces to respecting them as they are and protecting them from the destruction we have wrought on their natural habitats.

Candace Savage’s Crows also asks readers to look at birds in a different way. In this case, the Saskatoon writer presents new research from around the world about the much-maligned family of scavengers that suggests they have more in common with us than meets the eye.

Most notable is the finding that the New Caledonian crow, of Melanesia, is a tool user. It will peck and nibble a twig into a hook shape and then use it to scrape bugs out of tree trunks. As simple an action as it might seem, Savage points out that it has huge ramifications: “If one species of crows routinely makes and uses tools—a behavio[u]r so remarkable that it was until recently thought to be uniquely human—then what might the rest of those swaggering, black-clad wise guys be up to?”

Quite a lot, as it turns out. In her warm, folksy tone, Savage sheds light on new findings about crows’ complex social structure that sees an emphasis on cooperation instead of the every-bird-for-himself attitude observed in most populations. For example, older siblings often help their parents feed and protect the young, instead of moving away, while, in another case, an older male who had lost his top-bird status at his home nest started feeding a nearby widow’s young in order to restore his credibility as a provider and breeding partner.

Some of the most interesting material in Crows concerns whether the birds’ intelligence lends credence to their being the schemers and tricksters seen in mythologies the world over. Although the evidence is far from conclusive, stories about the lengths some ravens will go to deceive their brethren, such as pretending to hide food in a false cache to throw others off the trail of where the real stash is hidden, are intriguing and suggest that our relationship with birds will continue to evolve. As Savage writes, this deceptive behaviour “admits the raven into an exclusive club of sociable liars that in the past has included only humans and our closest primate relatives. Think of it as the survival of the trickiest.”