~ Anne Kilgannon
The dawn chorus is just beginning out there in my garden and there seems to be a lot of activity checking out possible nest sites and squabbling over invisible—to me—territorial lines. Though I keep watch on them from my windows or front porch—who cannot be cheered when a tumbling flock of Bushtits show up—how much do I really know about their lives other than to keep my feeders full of their favorite foods? I think of my “regulars” as my homebodies, but if, say, a warbler should alight, he brings a whiff of intrigue. Where has he been all winter and what has he been through to land here? Rebecca Heisman would know either the answer or where to find the answer. This is not an idle question of the moment for her.
The mysteries of migration were longstanding, back to Aristotle and beyond, but we have progressed in giant leaps and bounds since the days when it was imagined that swallows retreated to the bottom of ponds to see the winters through in the safety of the mud. World travel and the fine net of communication tools stretching over the entire earth have helped reveal the vast movements of birds and other beings as they search for sustenance and safe places to nest and rear their young through all the changing and challenging seasons. How do they do it? How do they pass on the routes they take from one end of the earth to the other to their offspring so they can carry on, and how did they discover them in the first place? How does a tiny bird know there will be a shore leading to a land of plenty as it crosses a dark sea with only the stars above for illumination? And, just as intriguing, how do we know about that tiny bird that flies through the night?
Rebecca wanted to know and has diligently searched out the complex weave of humans who also dedicated themselves to finding out just how birds find their way from here to “there” and back again. It is a very complicated story, just as complicated as the questions that drive it. She knows most of her readers will understand the basics of bird banding even if they have not personally participated in the mist net capture of birds and the careful measuring and banding humans have learned over the decades; it’s a good entry place for the uninitiated. We’re pulled into the quest by the thrill of holding a living bird in our hands! But the search for knowledge quickly gets more cerebral and less tactile.
I confess to being all thumbs and no insight into most matters of a technical or high-tech nature, so reading the chapters that delved into all the ingenious inventions for tracking birds as they traveled the stretches of earth and oceans was challenging. Yet, I was impressed and stayed with her study of the techniques that uncovered, bit by bit, what the birds were doing and what challenges they faced. Almost as astounding as the migrating birds were the humans whose drive to understand and document the fetes of flying involved some incredible fetes of their own persistence and incredible inventions to unravel the mysteries. Rebecca painstakingly tracked down the scientists and volunteers and inventors who have thrown themselves and their careers at these questions and pieced together everything we now know about migration. She uncovers their stories of constant tinkering and experimenting with different methods and models of equipment—their “try, try again” spirit—to both follow the birds and yet not detain or impede their flights. I was moved by their love and respect for the birds, the deeply held ethics of care that governed their curiosity and kept their own quest within proper bounds.
Rebecca follows the trail further, into the very cells of the birds to tease out even more of bird life mysteries through the stories DNA tracking can reveal. Again, though this part of the quest takes place deep in the laboratories and halls of academia, it was done with the care and love of free-flying birds, though out of sight, not out of mind. What also struck me—and this seemed vital to all the inventiveness involved—was the circuited routes these scientists took to reach these research positions, the cross-pollinations of different backgrounds and fields of knowledge brought together to spark methods of inquiry and understanding. Again, the dedication required by the exacting work of the research was often rooted in love for birds, no matter how arcane the methodology.
Rebecca takes us very far down this trail but does in the end bring us back to the fields, woods and shorelines where we can walk in the light of day and see birds living their bird lives, though perhaps a mystery to us, not to themselves. They know what to do and how to live. It’s been a complicated but enlightening journey. Now, if we humans would get out of the way and stop our heedless destruction of what makes bird lives possible…. That is a different story altogether.
