NEXT APPEARANCE:
Saturday, March 27th, Virginia Festival of the Book, 2:00
I'll be sitting on a panel entitled Publish and Flourish: Networking through Readerville.com, along with my online chums Gretchen Moran Laskas (The Midwife's Tale), M.J. Rose (Sheet Music), and, in a change from the original lineup, Roxana Robinson (Sweetwater). Readervillean, writer, and radio commentator Janis Jaquith (Birdseed Cookies) will moderate. Visit www.vabook.org for more information.

Every once in a while, if you're very lucky, you'll pick up a book and realize it was written for you. Usually, when that happens to me, the book in question is a novel; I can recall the rush I felt when I realized that Douglas Coupland had written Microserfs with my demographic in mind: college-educated semi-computer-literate middle-class American male with a pop culture fixation centered on the early seventies--the group for whom he coined the term Riot Nrrds. But it's a rarer and perhaps more amazing thing when the book in question isn't purely the creation of a mind whose formative experiences were similar to your mind's. A novelist can show you something you haven't seen before, and even a non-fiction writer can guide you through a part of the world with which you have no familiarity. What's surprising about the nonfiction book I recently finished, however, is that it took me into an area I'd visited before, and it showed me how much I'd missed there.

The book in question is David Quammen's The Song of the Dodo. I've been reading about Quammen's subjects for decades: birds, evolution, natural history, reptiles, extinction, mammals, scientific rivalry, colonial history, travel, spiders... I mean, there's a shelf behind my head at this moment with such works as Stephen Jay Gould's The Lying Stones of Marrakech, Gordon Grice's The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators, Tony Horwitz's Blue Latitudes: Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before, Tony Juniper's Spix's Macaw: The Race to Save the World's Rarest Bird, Anne Matthews' Wild Nights: Nature Returns to the City... and those are just the ones I own... and have read this year... written by people with names from G to M. In other words, when I engage in the following hyperbole, it's reasonably informed hyperbole:

The Song of the Dodo may be the best science book I've ever read.

Quammen is a writer, not a scientist, but that's to his advantage. Because he's not a scientist, he's liberated from the stylistic flaws that sometime haunt scientists' writings: he doesn't shy away from bold or impolitic statements, nor does he establish a lecturing tone. He's not pretending to be a scholar of the subjects he discusses (though the book's extensive bibliography suggests that he's done a good bit of reading up on his own). Instead, he sets himself up as an enthusiastic tour guide, running gleefully through the Museum of Island Biogeography and expounding upon every exhibit in extensive detail. He not only knows what each exhibit is, but how it got to the museum, which scientists were responsible for putting it there, how it relates to the other exhibits, and how to make its story as interesting as possible to his audience. He writes with as much wit and energy when describing the photocopies on a scientist's office door as he does when he's describing his trip through the spider-infested forests of Guam in search of venomous brown tree snakes. His mini-biography of Alfred Russel Wallace, the young unknown who hit upon the idea of natural selection at the same time as Darwin, draws the reader in from the beginning, and when he occasionally drops his guard to describe a search for a bird of paradise, or to imagine the last dodo's last days on earth, he reveals a touching and honest passion for the fragile world he lovingly describes.

It's a masterful performance, delivered in 178 individual islands of text spread over a sea of 600 pages, and I'm recommending it as strongly as I've ever recommended a book.
12:49 PM

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NEXT APPEARANCE: Saturday, March 27th, Virginia Festival of the Book, 2:00
I'll be sitting on a panel entitled Publish and Flourish: Networking through Readerville.com, along with my online chums Gretchen Moran Laskas (The Midwife's Tale), M.J. Rose (Sheet Music), and Clea Simon(The Feline Mystique). Readervillean, writer, and radio commentator Janis Jaquith (Birdseed Cookies) will moderate. Visit www.vabook.org for more information.

Winter is still here. It's brisk and windy, though sunny, and I'm still preparing my debaters for the state tournament in early March. Clearly, spring remains unsprung.

At the same time, though I know it's still winter--after all, the Juncos are still swarming in my back yard, landing on and around the feeder, and as long as they're around, I expect another snowstorm--I feel as if I'm starting to emerge from my cocoon a bit. I crawl into my cocoon at the start of the school year, roughly mid-September, and I don't really come out again until March. The fibers that enfold me are the ones that tie me to my extracurricular commitments: directing the fall Black Box play and coaching the debate/forensics team in the winter. But in the spring trimester, I have no such entanglements. I still teach, but when the last class is over for the day, I'm free to spread my wings and flutter about.

My upcoming schedule offers several options for doing a little fluttering. I've got an invitation to a reception in New York for the writers selected for Barnes & Noble's 2003 Discover picks. It'll be a brief visit, alas, as I have to give exams both before and after the day of the reception (and the presentation of the Discover award, which--you read it here first!--I won't be winning.) Still, it'll be nice to shift gears into Writer mode again, after having been in Teacher mode for six months.

(I'll get to return to Writer mode in late March, when I'll be part of a panel at the Virginia Festival of the Book (see above).)

I'm also planning a trip to Florida with my dad, and that should give me a chance to shift back into Birder mode. Florida is rife with unusual bird species, many of which exist nowhere else in America (and in some cases, on Earth): the Limpkin, the Snail Kite, the Mangrove Cuckoo, the Reddish Egret, Wurdemann's Heron, the Roseate Spoonbill, the Groove-Billed Ani. Dad and I plan to visit some of their habitats with field guides and binoculars in tow. If I'm really lucky, I'll talk him into renting a boat and following one of the canoe trails in the Everglades.

I'm already feeling somewhat Birderish again, thanks to one of my Christmas presents, a big and rather pricy Droll Yankee feeder that I think I've mentioned here before: the Yankee Flipper, specially designed to flip squirrels off its feeding perch with an automatic 90-degree spin. So far no squirrel has dared assault it directly, but a number have enjoyed feeding on the spillage left by the dozens of Juncos that have adopted the feeder as their own. (An occasional Chickadee, Cardinal, or White-Throated Sparrow has lit on it, too, but the Juncos are by far the most numerous and most regular visitors.)

We've also had a new visitor to the area, and I'll confess to a bit of mixed emotion here at seeing him. I spotted him this afternoon in one of the pine trees that flank the feeder-bearing cherry tree. He was jay-sized, but from what I could see out of the corner of my eye, he was a bit too dark. He also flapped from one branch to another in a vaguely crow-like fashion, but didn't seem big enough. A brief look into the pine told the story: long, cleanly squared-off tail, small head, small curved bill, pale underside--a Sharp-Shinned Hawk.

You might think this was a moment for untrammeled joy, and indeed, I was delighted to add the bird to my yard list. (He's the 46th species to fly through or over my yard since August of 1999, if you're wondering.) Nonetheless, a birder who sees a Sharpie in his yard has a good reason for feeling trepidation: the bird is an accipiter, a small hawk of the forest whose primary prey is smaller birds. It's hard not to feel guilty at the thought that your feeder serves primarily as a gigantic venus fly-trap for songbirds. On the other hand, there's no denying that hawks are cool in their own right, and it was quite a sight to watch this one leap out of the pine tree and engage in a sudden, darting chase around the yard in pursuit of a loudly protesting Cardinal. At least I can feel happy that she outdistanced him.

We're sure to get one more snowfall--we always get one after my birthday--but I'm starting to see some signs that the ol' vernal equinox is on its way. And man, I'm dying to get out of these threads.
1:07 PM

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