Birds: A Soap Opera. [How Birds Behave by Sharon Sorenson]

It was more than five years ago that I had a flourishing fire escape garden near the Queens-Brooklyn border in Ridgewood. My focus after the plants were the pollinators. Mint and alyssum I'd planted went to seed and the carpenter bees flocked. I lived a temporary dream in my city landscape. The fire escape of that building and the ones adjacent (and so on) sat opposite near identical buildings with near identical fire escape (when present) and yards. A few snowy winter mornings a swarm of birds (if memory serves they were a sea of red in a flurry of white and grey) continued to congregate in the neighbor's yard. One of these days, alone in the apartment, staring out the window and surveying the winter remnants of my cultivated verdure, I saw a massive bird. I tried to look and figure out what it was but I'd been looking at it, taking it in, awestruck, and not looking objectively for markers before it flew off. I was able to get one picture of the bird, but save its function as a memory trigger it's barely usable for identification purposes. Still, the impression of the chance encounter, in the city of all places, was the beginning of my conscious love of birds and my first dip into birding.

My limited efforts to increase my avian knowledge notwithstanding, it's then quite obvious why I was thrilled to request Sharon Sorenson's How Birds Behave: Discover the Mysteries of What Backyard Birds Do 365 Days of the Year. At this point it's just my bad habit, but as I've said before, I don't reread book descriptions once I've requested them, so besides general impressions and whatever the cover might tell me I go into my reads a bit blind. And sure, anyone else might have gleamed from the title that this a chronically of daily birding accounts, but I was genuinely surprised when I started my read.

Oh, the drama of birds. Can I tell you I hate House Wrens? And European Starlings. Sorenson's storytelling is dramatic, fluid, informative, conversational and engaging. I went from knowing very little about bird identification, differentiation, and classification to knowing a substantial bit more. From molting and migration patterns, to parasitisms and population declines, How Birds Behave has it all. The drama of life and death battles, the suspense of survival, the David and Goliath stories - I felt like I was reading a soap opera. And I couldn't help but put human faces or see the parallels of human behaviors in the avian stories and lives that played out in daily entries.

As the drama was getting juicier and juicier, I'd tell my mother and sister about this book. My two uncles, with their respective love of birds and their attentiveness to the flying visitors in their respective yards, both came to mind as people who'd enjoy this book as much, if not more, than I did. In a few weeks some friends of mine are to wed. Both animal science majors, I'm sure they'd also enjoy this. In short, this was a great book and I thoroughly enjoyed it. 5 stars.

How Birds Behave was published in February of 2020.