Welcome to the Nature Up Bookshelf

“Sparrow Envy” by J. Drew Lanham

 

MAY-JUNE 2022 FEATURED BOOK

SPARROW ENVY BY J. DREW LANHAM

About the book: “Renowned naturalist and writer J. Drew Lanham explores his obsession with birds and all things wild in a mixture of poetry and prose. He questions vital assumptions taken for granted by so many birdwatchers: can birding be an escape if the birder is not in a safe place? Who is watching him as he watches birds? With a refreshing balance of reverence and candor, Lanham paints a unique portrait of the natural world: listening to cicadas, tracking sandpipers, towhees, wrens, and cataloging fellow birdwatchers at a conference where he is one of two black birders. The resulting insights are as honest as they are illuminating.” Learn more on the book's webpage.

Why Carolyn picked this book to feature:

This is a book that every birder—especially those with white privilege—should read. Read it, reread it, underline and highlight it, and share it with friends. There are poems about beautiful birds, and beautiful moments birding. There are poems about the heartbreak and fear of living though 2020. About being Black in a community that is very white. About identifying with birds like American Crows, European Starlings, and Brown-headed Cowbirds that are often vilified by birders. Read this book, see the birding world through a different lens, and then think about how your words or actions are helping to shape the birding space. We can only fix what we know about—and in today’s world, ignorance is a choice.

Quote we love: 

“In these up and down days of fear. Of exhausting stress. Of breaking strain. Of questions unanswered. Of discord. Any comfort reliably, infallibly yet comes in the sun resting westward and leaving light that stops my heart and makes it beat all the more rapidly at once. It comes in the birds still remaining, hurtling themselves across the face of a waxing moon journeying to places better than here. I envy them in that courage to go where they must: in an obedience to follow wandering’s pull. In these things I can rest my waning faith. It is not in any being of rumored omniscience or in four-walled religion beyond earth and sky and day and night- and those beasts and hours that fall in between what we can see or what we might believe.

Until such time as the sun ceases to set in the west or migrating birds no longer ply dark even following guiding stars, I hope. I watch. I breathe.”

—from “Field Mark 25: Dum Spiro Spero”

Other Resources:

J. Drew Landham discusses "Sparrow Envy" with Mass Audubon’s Becky Cushing Gop.

 

Bookshelf Artwork by Green Sparrow Arts