A review of:
Brushed by Feathers: A Year of Birdwatching in the West
By Frances Wood

Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Publishing, 2004
Paper, 247pp. $16.95
ISBN: 1-55591-480-2

Whidbey author Frances Wood’s Brushed by Feathers: A Year of Birdwatching in the West is very attractive, even lovely. Book designer Ann Douden and Fulcrum Publishing of Golden, Colorado, deserve praise for a design which makes each page seem to be from an actual journal (though this journal has been typed rather than hand-written). Wood’s own drawings further the feeling that we’re reading entries in a birder’s monthly journal.

This is no ordinary journal, however, but a collection of varied and interesting essays. Brushed by Feathers proceeds month by month through the year. Each month’s opening ends with a list of the birds introduced that month. This becomes a usable checklist for those who want to use the book as the starting point for their own bird-watching lists. January, for example, focuses (logically) on birds which winter over in our region. Later months will focus on birds which migrate in to nest here, and others on birds which pass through on their way elsewhere. Still other sections explore our year-round birds.

Following each month’s opening are essays about owls, ducks, kingfishers, great blue herons, warblers, swallows, and raptors. “Raptors are the birds for folks like my friend Tom who says, ‘If ya can’t see ‘em without binoculars, they ain’t worth looking at.”

“Gangs in the ‘Hood,” is a very useful essay on bird-watching in the city. Another essay promises to tell us how to distinguish among the nine kinds of gulls on the west coast, and seems to keep that promise, though I haven’t gone out to the beach to try Woods’ method. After the pun which concludes Woods’ comments about gulls, it’s hard to concentrate: “Some good news with gull identification is that the sexes look alike. You don’t have to distinguish between the gulls and the boys. If you have trouble telling the gulls from the buoys, I suggest you get some better binoculars.”

Perhaps the most useful is the essay on nests and bird-houses, which let me know that I’ve tended to put up the wrong sort of bird-house. According to Wood, there’s only one good type, and it’s not the one most of us would select. The human fondness for birdhouses seems greater than that of birds; Woods points out that only 85 of America’s 600 birds nest in cavities—that is, bird-house sorts of places. The other 515 couldn’t care less about what birdhouses we put up.

One of this book’s delights comes from Wood’s own joy in nature, as in her response to a Whidbey marsh: “which flowed away like a patchwork of horizontal stripes in ribbons of green, ochre, and beige. Red-winged blackbirds sporting scarlet epaulets lifted from cattails then dropped with a liquid, gurgling “konk-a-REE,” followed by a trill. A song sparrow dressed in drab brown popped up from a tangle of rushes, gave a loud buzzlike “tow-wee,” and hid again.”
Yet, as is true for anyone who loves any aspect of nature, Woods has some concerns. For example, she reminds us of the value of our shrinking wetlands, which “not only provide habitat for birds and other wildlife, they also help our planet absorb and hold fresh water. Like human kidneys, wetlands filter pollution and capture nutrient runoff. They control erosion and prevent floods. Today we understand the precious value of wetlands and the cost of re-creating those that were lost.”

Though Woods is optimistic about our understanding of the value of wetlands, she’s not so about the effects of global warming. Scientists report, Woods tells us, that birds are migrating north as many as twenty-one days earlier than they did thirty years earlier, and that many species are going further north than formerly before they nest. Whether resident, year-round, species will slowly move northward or will stay here as our climate becomes drier and warmer is unknown.

Still, this book isn’t intended as a warning, but a celebration, as in this entry from March: ““The rest of the world may associate March Madness with basketball, but for me March madness always refers to spring migration. What could be crazier than a tiny bird—the weight of two dines—flying from Mexico to Alaska?” Most of us by now have heard of the travelling feats of hummingbirds, such as the eastern ruby-throated hummingbird which flies nonstop 500 miles across the Gulf of Mexico in twenty grueling hours. But we didn’t all realize that hummingbirds are found only in North and South America. No one else has hummingbirds, Wood tells us—not Europe, not Asia, not Africa. One hummingbird—Anna’s—doesn’t migrate, but stays along the West coast for the winter. Here on the coast we have only the Anna’s and the rufous, though the Cascades have those and three more.

September’s entry begins, “If August is quiet of bird songs, September is dead,” and goes on to reveal this startling bit of information: “During the non-breeding season, the section of a songbird’s brain that controls singing actually shrinks, making it unable to sing, even if the urge arose.” The amount of knowledge Woods shares is one of many pleasures in reading this book.

Eventually Woods reveals her own favorites, her “list of wild birds for which I’m truly grateful. Some directly influence our lives, some lay significant roles in the ecology of our forests, marshes, and open habitat, and some simply provide great viewing pleasure.” To learn which are Woods’ favorites, you’ll have to read the book. Some of them may surprise you.

Brushed by Feathers: A Year of Birdwatching in the West is available at Book Bay in Freeland, The Moonraker in Langley, and Kingfisher Books in Coupeville.

A reformed fiddlefoot, Wayne Ude grew up in Montana, earned an MFA from UMass-Amherst, directed social services programs in Montana and Massachusetts, taught in and directed creative writing programs on the MA level for 17 years, and has published four books of fiction. Since 1993 he has lived, written, and taught on Whidbey Island.