The Sky is Falling

I have been reading Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes, and Other Papers (N.D.) by John Burroughs. Burroughs (1837 to 1921) was a naturalist and essayist much influenced by Emmerson and Whitman. Birds and Bees …is courtesy Project Gutenberg, and I am reading it on my iPod. It seems odd to read a book on nature on such an unnatural device but this is the modern world after all.

Burroughs has a lovely, sometimes purple way of describing nature. I think his tendency to the descriptive is both a strength and a weakness of his writing. His work is detailed, employs a lot of metaphor and simile, and sometimes ventures down the purple path, but it is also very fitting for this style of writing. Reading Burroughs is like taking a walk with him as he describes the natural world. You experience nature as he does. Walking through his orchards, his dog ambling along at your side, and the ever present shot gun in case one encounters a red squirrel which he seems to have roundly hated.

Anthropomorphism is the cornerstone of his writing, something a modern naturalist is trained to avoid, although I do not think that they ever achieve the impartial observations they claim. Burroughs is definitely not of the Skinnerian school of animal study. I like Burroughs way of endowing his subjects with human qualities, because it reveals much about the writer and even helps the animal to become alive on the page. A media theorist I recently read, refers to animals as technology, and I much prefer the naïve humanist quality appropriated by Burroughs to describe his world, than the careless theoretic use employed by modernist theorists. But Burroughs does not have the transcendental quality of Emmerson or Thureau, nor the inspirational quality of the art of Whitman, rather his work is transportational (perhaps escapist).

Burroughs writing reveals a very active, sometimes combative naturalist. He is often irritable, especially when defending a bird. He rightfully hates the human plunderers of nests and birds, and, sadly, he shoots the non-human plunderers. Sometimes I wish that he would have reversed his policy. Burroughs reports his repeated and failed attempts to intervene with nature. Shooing cow birds away from nests, only to discover them back the next day. Finding grounded fledglings and putting them back into the wrong nest, where the fledgling then terrorizes and kills the residents. Something all students of nature have encountered, and have repeatedly tried to beat the odds, always failing.

What is surprising is the number of species that Burroughs documents. He lists a number and variety of species that we could not hope to encounter eighty years after he has written about them. Burroughs orchard is chock-full of birds, although he reports very low survival rates, estimating only one in ten fledgling survives.

I consider these terrible odds of bird species from only eighty years ago and then reflect on the birds that are now killed en mass. Most recently, thousands of birds have fallen from the sky in North and South America. Consider too, that every year thousands of migratory birds are killed by the tailing ponds of the tar sands, high rises, wind turbines, poor farming practices and other industries.

When British naturalists came to Canada, they reported that the sky was covered by a thick canopy of birds. Now we can look up and see a sky, empty of its former inhabitants.