The Bedside Book of Birds: An Avian Miscellany

• Published in: Border crossings 2006-03, Vol.25 (1), p.106
• Main Authors: Gibson, Graeme, Arnason, David
• Format: Magazinearticle
• Language: English
• Subjects: Animals; Birds; Literature
• ISSN: 0831-2559

[Graeme Gibson]'s The Bedside Book of Birds is an elegant and beautiful book. It is a collection of works of art depicting birds and excerpts from letters, stories, essays, poems, legends, folk tales and myths that deal with birds. The book is eclectic in the best sense of the word, drawing from a huge and diverse set of sources. It is also idiosyncratic, and its idiosyncrasy is part of what makes it marvellous. I've always felt that it isn't the plots or even the language of literature that gives it power and draws us to it, but the quality of the mind behind the work. I began watching birds many years ago when the practice was called "birdwatching," and I'm still a little uneasy about the shift to "birders" who go "birding." There is something a bit too rigidly scientific in this practice. And I don't like the way the familiar names of birds get changed by some obscure body that exercises an academy-like purist authority over language. I began watching Myrtle Warblers, and even if every field guide is cowered into renaming them Northern Warblers, I will continue to name them and speak to them in the vernacular. Flann O'Brien has an underground coterie of fans who memorize entire sections of his work and quote them aloud to like-minded fanatics in dark bars. They will love this work. Gibson's own sections are as beautifully written as any of his authors. His fans will remember some stunning passages from his brilliant novel Perpetual Motion, in which the passing of the passenger pigeons is brilliantly recorded.