This Book Club is for the Birds

Join our book club!
Each month, we'll feature a book for your reading pleasure, and we'll meet to talk about it.
 

November 14, 2024 3-4:30 pm The Birds that Audubon Missed by Kenn Kaufman
Raging ambition. Towering egos. Competition under a veneer of courtesy. Heroic effort combined with plagiarism, theft, exaggeration, and fraud. This was the state of bird study in eastern North America during the early 1800s, as a handful of intrepid men raced to find the last few birds that were still unknown to science. The most famous name in the bird world was John James Audubon, who aimed to illustrate (and write about) as many different species as possible. He obsessed with trying to outdo his rivals. The grudges were bitter, and claims were made of plagiarism and fakery.  Other naturalists of the era, including Charles Bonaparte (nephew of Napoleon), John Townsend, and Thomas Nuttall, also became entangled in the scientific derby.
Despite this intense competition, a few species managed to evade discovery for years. Here, renowned bird expert and artist Kenn Kaufman explores this period in history from a new angle, by considering the birds these people discovered and, especially, the ones they missed. Kaufman has created portraits of the birds that Audubon never saw, attempting to paint them in that artist’s own stunning style, as a way of examining the history of natural sciences and nature art. He shows how our understanding of birds continues to gain clarity, even as some mysteries persist from Audubon’s time until ours.  Zoom link

December 12, 2024 3 - 4:30 pm A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World's Smartest Birds of Prey by Jonathan Meiburg  
In 1833, Charles Darwin was astonished by an animal he met in the Falkland Islands: handsome, social, and oddly crow-like falcons that were "tame and inquisitive . . . quarrelsome and passionate," and so insatiably curious that they stole hats, compasses, and other valuables from the crew of the Beagle. Darwin wondered why these birds were confined to remote islands at the tip of South America, sensing a larger story, but he set this mystery aside and never returned to it. Almost two hundred years later, Jonathan Meiburg takes up this chase. He takes us through South America, from the fog-bound coasts of Tierra del Fuego to the tropical forests of Guyana, in search of these birds: striated caracaras, which still exist, though they're very rare. He reveals the wild, fascinating story of their history, origins, and possible futures. And along the way, he draws us into the life and work of William Henry Hudson, the Victorian writer and naturalist who championed caracaras as an unsung wonder of the natural world, and to falconry parks in the English countryside, where captive caracaras perform incredible feats of memory and problem-solving. A Most Remarkable Creature is a hybrid of science writing, travelogue, and biography, as generous and accessible as it is sophisticated, and absolutely riveting.

January 9, 2025  3 - 4:30 pm Flight Paths: How a Passionate and Quirky Group of Scientists Solved the Mystery of Bird Migration by Rebecca Heisman
For the past century, scientists and naturalists have been steadily unravelling the secrets of bird migration. How and why birds navigate the skies, traveling from continent to continent—flying thousands of miles across the earth each fall and spring—has continually fascinated the human imagination, but only recently have we been able to fully understand these amazing journeys. Although we know much more than ever before, even the most enthusiastic birdwatcher may not know how we got here, the ways that the full breadth of scientific disciplines have come together to reveal these annual avian travels.

Flight Paths is the never-before-told story of how a group of migration-obsessed scientists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries engaged nearly every branch of science to understand bird migration—from where and when they take off to their flight paths and behaviors, their destinations and the challenges they encounter getting there. Uniting curious minds from across generations, continents, and disciplines, bird enthusiast and science writer Rebecca Heisman traces the development of each technique used for tracking migratory birds, from the first attempts to mark individual birds to the cutting-edge technology that lets ornithologists trace where a bird has been, based on unique DNA markers. Along the way, she touches on the biggest technological breakthroughs of modern science and reveals the almost-forgotten stories of the scientists who harnessed these inventions in service of furthering our understanding of nature (and their personal obsession with birds).

February 13, 2025 3 - 4:30 pm The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan. 
Tracking the natural beauty that surrounds us, The Backyard Bird Chronicles maps the passage of time through daily entries, thoughtful questions, and beautiful original sketches. With boundless charm and wit, author Amy Tan charts her foray into birding and the natural wonders of the world. In 2016, Amy Tan grew overwhelmed by the state of the world: Hatred and misinformation became a daily presence on social media, and the country felt more divisive than ever. In search of peace, Tan turned toward the natural world just beyond her window and, specifically, the birds visiting her yard. But what began as an attempt to find solace turned into something far greater—an opportunity to savor quiet moments during a volatile time, connect to nature in a meaningful way, and imagine the intricate lives of the birds she admired.
See Amy Tan at the San Diego Bird Festival on March 1, 2025.

We've partnered with Warwicks to make these titles available. You'll receive a 20% discount! Order online at the following links:

An Immense World by Ed Yong https://www.warwicks.com/book/9780593133255
The Birds that Audubon Missed by Kenn Kaufman https://www.warwicks.com/book/9781668007594
A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World's Smartest Birds of Prey by Jonathan Meiburg www.warwicks.com/book/9781101911549 
Flight Paths: How a Passionate and Quirky Group of Scientists Solved the Mystery of Bird Migration by Rebecca Heisman www.warwicks.com/book/9780063161146 
The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan. www.warwicks.com/book/9780593536131 

Past titles:

October 10, 2024 3-4:30 pm An Immense World by Ed Yong 

September 12, 2024 3:00 -4:30 pm Keep Looking Up by Tammah Watts
August 8, 2024 3:00 -4:30 pm Birding Under the Influence by Dorian Anderson

July 11, 2024 3:00 - 4:30 pm - Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
June 13, 2024 3:00 - 4:30 pm - Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World by Christian Cooper