by Edited by Geoff Wisner, illustrated by Barry Van Dusen
Mercer University Press, 2024
Walden is Thoreau’s most famous book, but for some readers, the journal he kept for his entire adult life is the favorite. Editor Geoff Wisner has selected text from the journal for a delightful new book, A Year of Birds: Writings on Birds from the Journal of Henry David Thoreau.
Spanning more than 20 years, the Journal – which Thoreau once called his “field notes” – includes observations about seasons, plants, and animals from his daily walks. He wrote about birds frequently, so Wisner had plenty of passages from which to choose. Wisner has organized the selections by calendar month and day instead of year, taking the reader from March 1, day by day, through the seasons back to February 28. An index allows readers to locate passages about specific birds throughout the year.
“The importance of the seasons to Thoreau’s sense of nature and spirit is almost impossible to overstate,” Wisner writes in the preface. “By presenting his birds chronologically, we can see when different birds appeared at the same time, when the same bird appeared at different seasons, and what that meant to Thoreau’s spiritual and mental life.”
Thoreau’s fine descriptions, complemented by 150 of bird artist Barry Van Dusen’s beautiful watercolors and field sketches, let the reader join Thoreau in pastures, woods, and village streets in and near nineteenth-century Concord, Massachusetts, where the writer lived almost his entire life.
“Saw two tree sparrows on Monroe’s larch by the waterside,” begins the December 3 entry. “Larger than chip-birds – with more bay above and a distinct white bar on wings – not to mention bright chestnut crown and obscure spot on breast – all beneath pale ash. They were busily and very adroitly picking the seeds out of the larch cones. It would take man’s clumsy fingers a good while to get at one, and then only by breaking off the scales – but they picked them out as rapidly as if they were insects on the outside of the cone, uttering from time to time a faint tinkling sound.”
In the November 10 entry, Thoreau watches blue jays as they collect and break open acorns – “placing the acorn under one foot, hammer(ing) away at it” until they get to the meat. On May 11, he is surprised to see a songbird on the ground very near a snake, then realizes she is trying to distract the snake from her nearby eggs. On June 12, he describes a partridge that runs directly at him to allow her young to escape, and later that month, he climbs 15 feet up a tree to investigate a shrill twitter coming from a hole; it is, as he expected, a downy woodpecker’s nest.
Patience was one of Thoreau’s great observational skills; he liked to stand still until wildlife became accustomed to his presence and came closer than they normally would. Although he lived in an age when birds were commonly studied by being shot and then examined, Thoreau preferred leaving birds alive and studying their behavior, rather than just their physical features.
In addition to sharing many of Thoreau’s best descriptions of birds, Wisner’s book reflects the writer’s humor, and shows how intimately nature intersected with Thoreau’s own sense of time and well-being. I was struck by this comment, near the close of the calendar, on February 25.
“Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring,” he wrote. “If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature – if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep – if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you – know that the morning and spring of your life are past.
“Thus may you feel your pulse.”