Turning to Birds by Lili Taylor

Turning to Birds: The Power and Beauty of Noticing

by Lili Taylor

Crown Publishing 2025

Actress Lili Taylor, it turns out, is an avid birder when she's not on-camera, a board member of the National Audubon Society, the American Birding Association, and something called the New York City Bird Alliance. And now, as with so many avid birders, she's written a book, an elegant little thing called Turning to Birds, in which she watches flocks of birds in her own New York City, woodcocks in Ohio, quails in New Mexico, and so on.

In these pages, accompanied by black-and-white illustrations by Anna Koska, Taylor chronicles these adventures in clear, empathetic prose that makes the book feel delightfully personal. Unlike a good many enthusiasts of any kind (fewer birders, although it's been known to infect them too), Taylor hasn't become jaded; her wonder remains fresh. When a woodcock unexpectedly lands on her, for instance, her response is vivid: “I was gushing with joy and trying to contain it. If I could, I would race around with joy and try to contain it,” she writes. “If I could, I would race around in wide circles like a happy dog.”

One of the book's most persistent narrative strains is also easily its most charming: Taylor's urgent need to identify, an almost instinctive actor's reflex to inhabit the role, as it were. Like all modern bird books, this one has an eye always on conservation issues, but the identification here goes deeper and is often charmingly immediate to read. When she's contemplating chimney swifts, for example, Taylor reflects on their swarming into open chimney spaces and wonders who was the first one to do it:

What was it like dropping into a dark void? How did they grab onto the wall? If they dropped in so fast, how would they not drop all the way down to the bottom? I'd be scared if I had to do that. Another swift dropped down, like an ember in reverse. Another and another slipped away; then all at once the swifts funneled into the chimney in one great inky swirl. The world had gone silent, no fighting or squabbling. Two or three swifts remained flying in the now-bare circle; they were the rear guard, a beacon for lost swifts. What swift was out there who didn't know where the chimney was? That would be nerve-racking, to have to get here by dark. Where would it sleep if it didn't make it?

Turning to Birds comes back consistently to this refrain of paying attention to details and investing those details with their full importance. It's not groundbreaking stuff – birding is, after all, built on the act of careful noticing – but it's done with heart and enthusiasm.

 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