Early in his adult life Pyle chose to seek out a quiet, rural setting where he could settle in for life. He chose an obscure little town in southwestern Washington State, Gray’s River. His book Wintergreen: Rambles in a Ravaged Land, published two decades ago, chronicled a young man’s enthusiasm for his chosen place. That book was awarded the prestigious Borroughs award, given to a single book annually as the year’s best natural history book.
Sky Time in Gray’s River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place, is another look at the same region, but it’s by no means a repeat of Wintergreen. Pyle is an older man now and his relationship with his home turf is far more mature, far deeper and vastly more textured. This book is an elegant love letter to the land and its many components, the birds and wildflowers, his house and its garden (including the beloved compost pile), and the neighborhood community. The book follows the seasons, its twelve chapters mostly connected directly to the months of the year. We learn of this famous man’s fondness for his rather ordinary and un-famous standing within his community. We learn how he welcomes spiders into the shower and bees into a hole in the house’s wall, which leads to the curious concept of a buzzing bookshelf. The history of his house, the nearby covered bridge, and the Gray’s River Grange are all included. We even learn (and some birders doubtless cringe) that for two consecutive winters a Rustic Bunting visited the homestead, but Pyle’s need for quiet and semi-anonymity led him to share this rare bird sighting with just a select few.
It all may seem like mundane details about a place that most of us don’t know, will never visit, and don’t really care about. On the surface this is true. Yet this is luxurious prose, the most carefully crafted work of Pyle’s career. It’s an immensely pleasing book to read, but it’s not one to hurry through. Each page is as luscious as a delectable dessert. You wouldn’t want to gobble down a dozen desserts in a row; you shouldn’t read more than a chapter at a time of Sky Time in Gray’s River. Take the time to savor each carefully chosen adjective, let the pictures painted by Pyle’s words form fully in the mind’s eye. If you’re like me, you’ll find yourself yearning for your own bucolic get-away, a quiet and peaceful little village where life still proceeds at the pace of an earlier time. Few such places still exist, and in truth some of Pyle’s neighbors don’t find Gray’s River to be so idyllic. The enduring value of Sky Time is the lesson of perspective. As birders, as naturalists, we are privileged to find natural wonder every place we look. Pyle appears to take this sensibility to every day of his life, proving that paradise is perhaps something more internal than external, as long as we’ve left a little bit of nature intact.
Pyle, Robert Michael. Sky Time in Gray’s River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007. 256 pages, $20.00 cloth. ISBN-10: 039582821X; ISBN-13:978-0395828212.
The articles seem to have been selected based on two criteria: genuinely useful information that the casual birder will find interesting, and questions that are downright bizarre. The results are mixed. Don’t assume you’ll love the book just because you’re a “Car Talk” fan. This brand of goofy humor works better in the spontaneous medium of radio than in print, for one thing, and O’Connor’s humor comes with a bit of an unfriendly bite at times. I found a few comments amusing, but there were no “laugh out loud” moments for me. Still, it is fun to ponder questions like the one posed in the title and it is amazing to learn that someone could ask the question, apparently in all seriousness, “Are flamingos just an odd bird that zoos have created?”
O’Connor runs a retail store for bird watchers and sells lots of bird seed, so many questions revolve around the art and science of bird feeding. Once a salesman always a salesman, and there are times when O’Connor is clearly pitching sales. But after you get past the promotional paragraphs, snippy insults, and silly jokes, there is good, sound information that can help the casual backyard bird feeder.
O’Connor also tackles many questions that are very familiar to me and any other person who has worked for an Audubon Society, nature center, or in any other capacity that labels one as a “bird expert” to the non-birding world. We all develop our stock answers to these questions, and it’s interesting to see his take on such perennial favorites as, “Why do birds stand on one leg?”, “Why are there Robins here in the winter?”, “Will the mother bird still feed her chicks if I touch them?”, “Will birds get sick eating rice thrown at weddings?”, “How fast do birds fly?”, “What happened to the birds that were coming to my feeders?”, “Will my hummingbird feeder keep the birds from migrating?”, “Why is a woodpecker pecking on metal?”, and of course, the age-old favorite, “How do I keep squirrels away from my bird feeders?”
If these are questions about which you ponder, the answers are here. If you need a little book costing $10 as a gift for someone who enjoys feeding birds, you could do worse than picking up this book. But Why Don’t Woodpeckers Get Headaches isn’t meant to be taken seriously, so for goodness sakes let’s not take it seriously here.
O’Connor, Mike. Why Don’t Woodpeckers Get Headaches: And Other Bird Questions You Know You Want to Ask. Boston, Beacon Press, 2007. 212 pages, $9.95 paper. ISBN 13: 978-0-8070-8574-5; ISBN 10: 0-8070-8574-X.