Nonfiction
The Armchair Birder Goes Coastal: The Secret Lives of Birds of the Southeastern Shore
John Yow
The University of North Carolina Press; 256 pages; $26
In his first book, “The Armchair Birder” (2009), Acworth resident John Yow explained his basic, no-nonsense approach to birding: He never had to leave the comforts of home.
The former senior editor at Marietta’s Longstreet Press just wasn’t the ambitious type: “I can’t claim to have driven 300 miles in the middle of the night to see the avocets at dawn on Delaware Bay,” he explained. “As for my ‘life list,’ you could just about get the whole thing down on a cocktail napkin.”
Back then, it was all about observing whatever could be glimpsed at the back yard feeder. “The armchair birder doesn’t have to go anywhere,” Yow offered cheerfully. “Because here’s the thing: Reading is encouraged.”
To that end, he combined his own personal observations and anecdotes with passages lifted from the pages of classics by John James Audubon, Arthur Cleveland Bent and Edward Howe Forbush, all naturalists whose volumes, Yow noted, “weren’t just chock-full of incredible information. They were also charming, witty, anecdotal, readable.”
The result was a delightfully erudite, handy little book filled with an appealing bricolage of old and new—plus, along with the “secret lives of familiar birds,” each chapter offered up a little of Yow’s secret behaviors too. At least, when it came to bird-watching.
Between then and now, Yow came up with another idea: Why not an “armchair birder” for people who lived at the beach? Wouldn’t they, too, like to know more about the birds who visited their back yards?
Thus was born “The Armchair Birder Goes Coastal.” For this sequel, Yow ended up traveling much further than 300 miles in search of the elusive avocet. Beginning with a trip to Carrabelle Beach, he bird-watched on islands and wildlife refuges in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Mississippi and Alabama.
Twenty-eight essays share Yow’s encounters with as many coastal birds: The Black-Necked Stilt, the American Oystercatcher, the Anhinga, the Wood Stork, the Brown Pelican, the Royal Tern, the Double-Crested Cormorant, the Snowy Egret and the Roseate Spoonbill are just some examples, but chances are, all your favorites are here.
Each chapter looks at a different bird—its coloration, call, history, migratory and feeding patterns, mating rituals, nesting habits, and survival skills—“in leisurely, appreciative detail.” Yow returns to Audubon, Bent and Forbush for much of this information, as well as the internet site, “Birds of North America Online” (BNA), but this time around adds coastal birding books such as Gardner Stout’s “The Shorebirds of North America,” and Rachel Carson’s “Under the Sea Wind.”
The mash-up of facts, observations and samples meshes as seamlessly here as in the original “Armchair.” Though some of Yow’s sources date back to the early 19th and 20th century, their commentary holds up, sounding either remarkably contemporary or appropriately quaint— especially to describe the courtly mating dances of these often majestic shore birds.
Compare the drab, unromantic voice of BNA—“Male simply grabs female’s neck with bill”—with this impassioned detail from Bent’s “Life Histories”: “Now and again, a special ceremony … is indulged in; with loud cries the birds face each other and lean their necks forward, partly or wholly intertwining them, each feverishly nibbling at each other’s aigrettes.”
Yow smoothly dovetails these classic quotes with present-day sources, such as this highlight from “The Verb ‘To Bird’” (2003) by Peter Cashwell, describing the “long black, slender bill” of the American avocet, “which curves gracefully and noticeably upwards, something like Nixon’s nose in the political cartoons of my youth.”
And in prose equally as memorable, here is Yow’s take on the visually unassuming willet: “I couldn’t help but admire the way those all-gray head and neck feathers lie down tight and neat, giving this bird a clean-cut look like a just-shorn GI.”
The main attraction of the “Armchair” books is their author’s eloquent but conversational style, along with a self-deprecating, wry humor and curiosity that often turns the tables from bird-watching to people-watching. When he peers at a puzzling array of signs posted in the kitchen of his cousin’s house on Cedar Keys, It’s not hard to picture him perched on the windowsill: “On the oven door: ‘No oven.’ On the wall above the microwave, toaster and coffeemaker: ‘Caution! Use only one appliance at a time.’ Above the toaster: ‘Toast does not pop up on its own.’”
There’s a serious side to “The Armchair Birder Goes Coastal”—its focus on the threat to bird populations throughout the last century and the devastation of the coast today due to real estate development. In addition to chronicling the slaughter of shoreline birds for sport, food and their plumage, Yow sheds much-needed light on the present-day habitat destruction that has become these birds’ most lethal enemy.
Simple pen-and-ink portraits suit the breezy tone of the book: the only drawback is that there isn’t one for every bird.
You don’t have to go coastal to fall in love with this literary compendium of birding, easily as “charming, witty, anecdotal, [and] readable” as its forefathers. Not that it wouldn’t make a great take-along for your next trip to the beach—or marsh or bay—to help identify birds, as well as to enjoy the fascinating and idiosyncratic “secret” lives promised in the title. Or heck, just stay at home and let Yow do all the legwork.
