Mercer
Review by David Starkey

I happened to spend last Saturday morning at Walden pond, on a warm October day, with plenty of people fishing, swimming in the 68-degree water and hiking around the pond’s perimeter. It’s a busy place, with a ranger station and a gift shop and not enough parking for all the folks who want to partake of the Thoreauvian experience.
Still, despite the crowds, it’s not hard to notice the birds flitting from tree to tree and calling to one another in their distinctive songs. If you squint, and happen to be somewhere on the fenced trail without any human companionship, you could almost imagine yourself back in the 1850s, accompanying the great writer and naturalist as he made his way through the woods, noticing just about everything.
In A Year of Birds: Writings on Birds from the Journal of Henry David Thoreau, edited by Geoff Wisner and illustrated by Barry Van Dusen, the entry for the day I was there, the 5th, is a longish one. Thoreau describes an osprey skimming over the pond then suddenly making a “dive or stoop for one of these little fishes that rise to the surface so abundantly at this season. He then sits on a bare limb over the water, ready to swoop down again on his finny prey–presenting as he sits a erect a long white breast and belly–and a white head.”
Like many of the entries in A Year of Birds–and there is, indeed, one entry per day for every day of the year, mostly from 1851-1860–Thoreau’s notes are well-observed but hardly groundbreaking, and many are quite short. For instance, the notation for the day I am writing this review, October 9, reads: “Saw a jay stealing corn from a stack in the field.” (July 14, in the appendix on passenger pigeons, simply says, “See a pigeon.”)
This is a lovely little book, but while the overall effect of reading 365 entries about birds by one of America’s great writers is both illuminating and exhilarating, it is also a bit mind-numbing.
On the one hand, it is a delight to encounter so many different birds: hawks and jays and crows, chipping sparrows and black-capped chickadees and golden-crowned kinglets, scarlet tanagers and American bitterns and downy woodpeckers. We meet a “pretty tame” hermit thrush on October 22 and a couple of days later a skein of “faintly honking” Canada geese. Thoreau is particularly good at insightful comparisons. On May 21, we learn that a “catbird sings like a Robin sometimes,” and on the following day (two years later) we are told that a “hummingbird dashes by like a loud bumblebee.”
The selection of journal entries, made by Wisner, is judicious. Even when Thoreau is deeply engaged in his birdwatching–following the tracks of a flock of snow buntings on December 23, 1859, for instance, or attending “to the different notes of the blackbirds” on March 29, 1853–Wisner is careful not to let Thoreau go on too long. And yet I suspect many readers will ultimately find the book most satisfying not as a straight read, from the first of March (1855), “I heard the fine drawn phe-be note of the chickadee,” to the final day of February (also 1855), “Found a hangbird’s nest fallen from the ivy maple–composed wholly of…one real thread all as it were woven into a perfect bag.” Instead, this is a book best skipped around in, or picked up certain days of the year to find out what bird Thoreau was watching on that date.
Aside from Thoreau’s’ own observations, what makes A Year of Birds special are the many illustrations by Barry Van Dusen. A Massachusetts-based artist, Van Dusen specializes in drawing birds in the field, and his color plates have a fresh, slightly unfinished look that feels appropriate for a dedicated birder like the author, who would frequently only catch sight of a bird for a few seconds, just long enough to register its species and particular beauty. Among my favorite illustrations are those showing a rose-breasted grosbeak on May 24, 1855; a merlin nestled in the autumn foliage on October 2, 1859, and a pair of red-tailed hawks on June 13, 1853. Just about every page has one illustration, most of them in color, which goes a long way toward bringing Thoreau’s journal to life in this book that, as Peter Alden notes in his Foreword, should “inspire you to saunter in your local wild places with binoculars and a field guide.”