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I thought of that as I reviewed the present I bought for Rachel, Peterson's North American Birds, a CD-ROM from Houghton Mifflin Interactive. In recent years the two of us have taken to hiking together, and it's more fun to correctly identify the birds we see than making stuff up ("Unless I'm very much mistaken, and I seldom am, that's a blue-breasted emu").
The program takes the beloved guide by birdmaster Roger Tory Peterson and does it up multimedia-style. You can encounter birds by their calls, by their habitats, or as the birds themselves do, in alphabetical order. And on the cover of the box is a big red cardinal, just like on our cards.
I haven't seen a cardinal this winter. Perhaps that's because I haven't filled our bird feeder for a week. Since the big snow, it's hard to get to our feeder.
What we have had is crows. After last week's big snow, there were about forty big ones in an elm, braying in the cold like black hens. They were so plump, they put me to wondering if eating crow would really be so bad.
You have to have North American roots to make it into North American Birds. The ring-necked pheasant, which we know from driving down prairie highways, was imported from China in the 19th century. The pheasant made it into the Guide.
Ostriches didn't. When our family drove through eastern Texas last September, we passed an ostrich farm. I called out "OSTRICH!" But my son Jon couldn't swivel in time to see, and he sobbed piteously all the way to Beaumont to turn back and see the big birds. Despite ostrich breeding booths at the State Fair, and the pamphlets explaining everything except how to fit one in your oven, ostriches are not yet a staple, of either our diet or North American Birds.
The one shortcoming I can see to a multimedia bird book is that it does not readily lend itself to field use. I suppose you could take a laptop with you to the high tundra, and hope the battery holds up long enough to identify the rock ptarmigan, and hope the laptop is as silent in the bush as the P in the bird's name.
More likely, Rachel and I will make notes to ourselves and consult the disk when we get back, to settle bets. And to show the kids there is more to birds than Jurassic Park.
I wasn't kidding when I said you could explore the birds in alphabetical order. It's not a bad way, either. I found these names just under J: the jackdaw, the junco, the jaeger. And that doesn't include the jays under J, the blue, the brown, the green, the gray. The sound is very clear. As you page through the guide, the disk fills the room with the chirps of a hundred birds.
Birds are like us. While we draw near to hear their song, what they are singing is something like, "Stay away, this is my space!" Thank God for windows. When my stepdad was sick with cancer, we sat in his living room watching the birds at the feeders outside. On a bad day you will get nothing but grackles, with their oil-slick plumage. On a good day, though, we sat quietly and watched the warblers and chickadees, finches and even hummingbirds take turns finding the perfect seed, cracking it open and moving on. As Dick got sicker, he got calmer. I think the birds helped take him out of himself.
I have a friend in Prospect Park whose son died at age 14, about 20 years ago. She told me that she thought of him and the walks they took whenever she heard a whip-poor-will, a bird that makes its nest low on the ground, with its little vip-por-vee! cry.
I nodded, as if I knew from experience what the whip-poor-will looks and sounds like. But until I booted up North American Birds, I didn't. Here's a description:
"Often heard but seldom observed, the whip-poor-will chants its name on summer night in eastern woods. The song may go on endlessly. One patient listener once counted 1,008 whip-poor-wills given rapidly without a break. By day the bird sleeps on the forest floor, perfectly camouflaged against a background of dead leaves."
When I played the voice just now on my computer, our dog stood up and stated barking.
Hanukkah is over and Christmas is near. This holiday season, the bird I want to see outside my window is the red bird from the cards. Neither Jewish nor Christian nor Buddhist nor Jain, it is a piece of the puzzle that all of them are, alive and bright against the snow.
I know, it would help if I filled the feeder.
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