Birdpedia by Christopher Leahy

Birdpedia: A Brief Compendium of Avian Lore
By Christopher W. Leahy
Princeton University Press, 2021

Tens of thousands, perhaps even by now many hundreds of thousands of readers must already know ornithologist Christopher Leahy's name and have a well-word copy of his huge, inexhaustible 1985 book The Birdwatcher's Companion. In either of its editions, the Companion was a doorstop marvel, cramming what seemed like the entire world of avian science, detail, literature, and trivia into one volume.

The only possible drawback to the Companion was its size, although that didn't stop many a hardy birder from lugging it along on treks across field and marsh. Any stooped shoulders or cramped hands will find some relief in Leahy's latest, Birdpedia: A Brief Compendium of Avian Lore. It's a lovely, tough little hardcover sans dust jacket, with many interior illustrations by Abby McBride, and the contents are arranged alphabetically, from “abundance” (just how many birds are there, anyway?) to “Zugunruhe,” a term (German, naturally) for “travel restlessness,” the particular jumpiness exhibited by birds who are on the verge of migrating. Here readers will learn about avian evolution, avian diet and exercise, avian cognition, and all the rest, but without the many learned digressions into hard science that helped to flesh out The Birdwatcher's Companion.

Like that earlier book, there's impressive sweep in these pages, with Leahy commenting comfortably on everything from the mythical Roc to the arrival of humans in the New World during the Pleistocene:

Some students of Pleistocene megafauna and its demise have recently argued persuasively that the collapse of this ecological community not long after the arrival of people in its midst may not be simply coincidental. Alas, this would be consistent with the fate of large animals, especially large birds – elephant birds, moas, dodos, Great Auks – that quickly follows their first meeting with our species.

And also like the earlier classic, here too Leahy is both occasionally droll – as when he clarifies that birds do not, indeed cannot, fart (although parrots, being parrots, will sometimes simulate the sound in order to get attention) – and occasionally argument-provoking, as when he makes the astonishing declaration that although a Cooper's Hawk might occasionally carry off a small chick, it will hesitate to tackle an adult hen. The term “chicken hawk,” he insists, “has little basis in fact and has been one of the many pretexts, especially pre-bird conservation laws to kill raptors.” Very true and worth saying, even if every Cooper's Hawk on Earth is enjoying a good chuckle at hearing it.

As Leahy notes, it might be worth looking into a little book “to find out why so many otherwise sane people are staring into trees or smell mudflats.” With able help from Abby McBride, he's provided such a book. Many more thousands of devoted readers can be confidently predicted.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.