Our book today is a slim, intensely satisfying anthology assemble by legendary Cape Cod nature writer John Hay in 1996 called The Great House of Birds, drawing together some of the author’s favorite writings about birds. They were a lifelong source of fascination for Hay (“birds fly away from us,” he writes, “with an unspoken invitation to follow after”), and he was a voracious and retentive reader, and the that happy combination makes this for my money the single best bird-writing anthology ever made, winning out over some much, much longer items.

Hay’s picks range very widely, from ancient Greece and Rome to colonial America, when the wonderstruck Hector St. John de Crevecoeur extolled the beauty of the hummingbird in his Letters of an American Farmer:

On this little bird nature has profusely lavished her most splendid colours; the most perfect azure, the most beautiful gold, the most dazzling red, are for ever in contrast, and help to embellish the plumes of his majestic head. The richest palette most luxuriant painter could never invent anything to be compared to the variegated tints, with which this insect bird is arrayed.

The selections skip from the pleasing but predictable – Thoreau, Konrad Lorenz, Annie Dillard – to dozens of names that once enjoyed renown and have since faded from public sight, like Donald Culross Peattie, whose 1935 An Almanac for Moderns Hay rightly praises for its pitch-perfect mixture of natural history and prose poetry:

At this moment the meadowlarks whistle good-by to June; ss-wheee-tu-yu, they call across the meadow where abandoned old apple trunks, orchard grass and Queen Anne’s lace all lean one way. Their voices call from the north, and, like an echo, against the hills from the south, but ever out of sight, until the whole blue basin of heaven is ringing with their cries. Though the song bubbles upward from the grass, it sounds as though it fell from the faultless blue of the sky.

Even twenty years ago, it seemed natural to Hay to included some warning notes about the fragility of avian life under the many onslaughts of humanity’s continuous expansion. He could hardly have chosen better than Fred Bodsworth’s The Last of the Curlews, a hymn of praise to the now-extinct Eskimo curlew:

Behind them now the Arctic’s aurora borealis was flashing vividly above the Labrador skyline, but when they came to earth again, with flight feathers frayed and their breast muscles numbed by fatigue, it would be in a dank jungle river-bottom of the Guianas or Venezuela. Yet there is no fear or hesitation now with the take-off, no recognition of the drama of the moment. There was only a vague relief to be off. For it was a blessing of their rudimentary brains that they couldn’t see themselves in the stark perspective of reality – minute specks of earthbound flesh challenging an eternity of sea and sky.

It’s off this last and saddest of his topics just a bit, but Hay can’t resist including a haunting, typically eloquent quote from William Beebe, and neither can I:

The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer; but when the last individual of a race of living beings breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be seen again.