Mildly amusing essays on birding and birds. Got a little cloying after a while, but there were a few funny bits. ( )

As an avid birder, I am drawn toward books on the topic. This is tied for the top slot of all time for me with Providence of a Sparrow by Chris Chester. Hilariously funny (if you are a birder). Highly, Highly recommend it!! ( )

They're everywhere. We're surrounded by feathers, beaks, wingbeats, caws and chirps. If you're a character in an Alfred Hitchcock movie, this could be rather troubling; but for the majority of us, birds are literally the background music in our daily lives. Birds are so common, we hardly know they're there. You probably passed 150 birds on your way to work today and didn't even give them a blink of thought.

For some people like Peter Cashwell, however, every bird is a cause for celebration and an excuse to pull off to the side of the road, grab the binoculars, and thumb frantically through Petersen's Field Guide to Birds. Cashwell, a high school English teacher, has a particular hobby--actively pursuing birds to add to his "life list" of sightings. That's why, in the pages of The Verb "To Bird", you'll find him walking along a Delaware shore in a howling wind in search of an American Avocet or enduring swarms of biting bugs in South Carolina to get a positive ID on a female Painted Bunting. Each new bird means a checkmark and a private whoop of joy.

That joy is contagious on every page of his book. Some of you may be thinking that a book on birding would be about as exciting as reading Hexnuts and the Paintings of Vermeer: a Critical Comparison, but I'm here to tell you that The Verb "To Bird" might just be the most stimulating thing you've read in a long time--it's the literary equivalent of a caffeine-laced, sugar-jolted energy drink.

The book opens with an engaging argument on why the noun "bird" can also be used as a verb for the singular obsession with All Things Feathered. Through grammatical breakdown and reasonable persuasion, Cashwell shows how he and others like him bird like other people fish.
I don't think it's accurate, however, to say that people like me "bird-watch." The term suggests that we lie around waiting for birds to appear, and that when they do, we sit passively and stare at them. In reality, those who bird pursue birds, observing them, memorizing their names, learning their field marks and calls, chasing them over hill and dale, recording their voices, netting and banding them, photographing them, and, most importantly, arguing about them with other birders. I doubt that clock-watchers act this way around clocks.

Cashwell peppers the book with self-deprecating humor (he knows he's a member of a geeky clique), pop culture references and sly word play. He's also an intelligent guide on our tour of the avian world, patiently explaining the differences between the Great Egret, the Snowy Egret and the Cattle Egret.

He takes us on several weekend treks along the Eastern Shoreline, spreading his enthusiasm for the Winged Ones every step of the way.

At under six inches, the Carolina Wren will never be considered spectacular in the same way as a Whooping Crane, but its teakettle teakettle teakettle cry is astonishing in its volume, the knob of which, as Spinal Tap's Nigel Tufnel would say, clearly goes to eleven.

Whether he's describing the first folio of Audubon's Birds of North America which weighed 56 pounds and was the size of a bathtowel because the painter-naturalist wanted the bird portraits to be life-size ("Coffee tables must have cowered in terror at the mere mention of Audubon's name") or whether he's giving us an etymological history of how the Cardinal came to be named, the prose is always light and engaging, masterfully combining science, history, humor, and memoir.

This is one of those rare books I tore through in practically two sittings. As I neared the end, I so desperately did not want it to end. Cashwell's book is infectious...like a good strain of bird flu. ( )