A book to help the ordinary birdwatcher appreciate the fascinating songs, stories, and science of common birds.

"Grounded in science but watered by the heart of a poet, this intimate and personal look at the lives of the birds we see every day invites us to slow down and look again." —John Muir Laws

Jack Gedney’s studies of birds provide resonant, affirming answers to the questions: Who is this bird? In what way is it beautiful? Why does it matter? Masterfully linking an abundance of poetic references with up-to-date biological science, Gedney shares his devotion to everyday Western birds in fifteen essays. Each essay illuminates the life of a single species and its relationship to humans, and how these species can help us understand birds in general. A dedicated birdwatcher and teacher, Gedney finds wonder not only in the speed and glistening beauty of the Anna’s hummingbird, but also in her nest building. He acclaims the turkey vulture’s and red-tailed hawk’s roles in our ecosystem, and he venerates the inimitable California scrub jay’s work planting acorns. Knowing that we hear birds much more often than we see them, Gedney offers his expert’s ear to help us not only identify bird songs and calls but also understand what the birds are saying. The crowd at the suet feeder will never look quite the same again. Join Gedney in the enchanted world of these not-so-ordinary birds, each enlivened by a hand-drawn portrait by artist Anna Kus Park.

Chapter 14: The View from Above

Red-tailed Hawk, Buteo jamaicensis

Some birds I love to listen to. Red-tails I love to watch.

It starts with looking at the sky. It’s always up there, the biggest thing in my life, an inexhaustible immensity that puts the little objects of quotidian existence into proper perspective. And often when I look at that huge expanse of blue, feeling a visceral release as I no longer confine my vision to books and screens and what fits within these tiny walls, I’ll spot someone up above, some being soaring effortlessly through that sea without a shore or bottom. The red-tailed hawk is that spirit of the sky.

I look with my naked eye, as birders sometimes forget to do, and see the red-tail not in the artificial, claustrophobic framing of binoculars, but set within the vast unbounded space that is her truer context. I can’t go anywhere without running into buildings and fences and prohibitory signs that trammel me in, but the red-tail has no borders. She flies to any distance, until she chooses to turn around. She rises and never meets a ceiling, just a thinning of the air as it continues toward the sun.

I look with binoculars and catch a glimpse of life far from this plodding earth. You can’t really look at just the sky alone in binoculars, the big blue with nothing to focus on. But when I find a hawk, then I can see someone a thousand feet above the ground. My binoculars divide the distance by ten—now I am a hundred feet away, and so nine hundred feet from where I started. My feet are no longer on the ground and my head is in the clouds.

It’s generally considered amateurish or old-fashioned to speak of the majesty and nobility of hawks in unqualified generalities. They are birds like other birds and not higher spiritual beings. Most modern nature writers aim for scientific respectability. I aim for scientific respectability! But sometimes I regret how we’ve become too grown up for eagle dreams and squelch our natural impulse toward admiration in a self-censorship of sensibleness. The coat of sensibleness can get quite stifling and burdensome, and I hope I never forget how to throw it off. Sometimes I think my only difference from people who find nothing grand in birds or trees is that I have a more weakly developed sense of personal naïveté or embarrassed foolishness to hold me back from natural enthusiasm. But I’ll take a little embarrassment any day rather than give up my world of splendor, and so I let my thoughts of hawks follow where my instincts take me first:

I think a soaring red-tailed hawk is one of our most powerful images of freedom and rising above the trivial. I think to see a hawk at closer quarters is to see the strength that makes one fearless inscribed in beak and talon. And to return a red-tail’s gaze is to meet something that is hard to find in the eyes of finch or sparrow: the immoveable intention of the wild and untamed.