The Courage of Birds — and the Often Surprising Ways They Survive Winter

by Pete Dunne

illustrated by David Allen Sibley

Chelsea Green Publishing 2024

Every publishing season sees the publication of a handful of lovely little bird books. It makes sense, and from more than simply a marketing standpoint; birds are universally interesting, and a well-designed little bird book is virtually guaranteed to tempt shoppers in bookstores. 

The latest of these is a perfect example: The Courage of Birds by conservationist and bird expert Pete Dunne, with black-and-white full-page illustrations by David Allen Sibley. The book’s title continues, “and the Often Surprising Ways They Survive Winter,” and these are the stories Dunne relates: seasonal migration, the intricacies of feathers (which he describes as the “first line of defense against winter cold”), and the array of adaptations that help non-migrating birds to survive the old-fashioned stereotypical conception of winter, with its plunging temperatures and blankets of ice and snow. 

Each of the book’s brief chapters deals with some aspect of this, from food foraging to shelter-finding, with Dunne occasionally and charmingly detouring into longer descriptions of particularly bad winters from living memory. The text is barely 150 pages, but it packs in quite a bit of both information and reminiscences, and it can sometimes rise to evocative prose, as when Dunne is writing about that icon of traditional winter, the Snowy Owl, and how jolting it can be to meet one. “To be pinned in the gaze of a Snowy Owl,” he writes, “is to be anointed by winter …”

And naturally, any 21st-century nature book must mention the wide-scale assault on nature by the 21st century. The populations of North American birds have been devastated in the last three decades; as Dunne notes, it’s been a 30 percent population decline, and there’s no end in sight. But even here, Dunne’s cheery narrative tone injects some hope. “The loss of three billion birds begins with a single bird,” he writes. “But the road to recovery does, too. The bird you save through your mindfulness and actions may be the turn-around bird.” 

That last line is quite obviously the point where optimism warps into delusion, but the sentiment is nonetheless intensely valuable. There may be nothing that Dunne’s readers can do to salvage winter, but there’s still plenty they can do to save birds. As Dutton wisely advises, start local and act with compassion. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News