Bird expert indulges in lyrical flights of fancy

Pete Dunne’s Essential Field Guide Companion: A Comprehensive Resource for Identifying North American Birds
By Pete Dunne
Houghton Mifflin, 710 pp., $29.95

The biologist Edward O. Wilson begins his 2002 book, "The Future of Life," with a letter to Henry David Thoreau, telling him what poor stewards of the natural world we have been. "Now, prophet of the conservation movement, mentor of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.," he writes, "accept this tribute tardily given." But in the next paragraph, he writes, "On the other hand, you were not a great naturalist. . . . Even had you kept entirely to natural history during your short life, you would . . . be scarcely remembered today."

Yet Thoreau is remembered for his love of nature, his conviction of its importance, and especially for the literary style in which he celebrated it. If he was a prophet of conservation, he was also a forerunner of the literary naturalist whom we now take for granted, such as Edwin Way Teale, Frances Theodora Parsons, W. H. Hudson, and Henry Beston -- like Thoreau, none remembered as much for their knowledge as for their mingling of nature and style.

In this remarkable reference book, Pete Dunne is clearly in that tradition, which reminds us how much it has fallen out of favor. One can't imagine most modern guidebook authors writing of a bird, as Hudson did in "Birds and Man," in 1901, "It is unlikely that I shall ever again see the furze wren in this aspect, with a curious splendour wrought by the sunlight in the dark but semitranslucent delicate feathers of his mantle; but its image is in the mind and with a thousand others equally beautiful, remains to me a permanent possession."

But Dunne, director of the Cape May, N.J., Bird Observatory and author of nine previous books on birds, brings some of that romantic/literary feeling to his detailed entries on the 691 birds of North America. He uses a newer method of bird identification, developed at Cape May, known as GISS, "general impression of size and shape." With GISS, the observer relies relatively less on visible plumage and more on overall appearance and behavior. It tends to summon the language of the classic naturalists, who often gave a sense of the observed thing, using metaphorical renderings, along with definitive details comparable with other references. A few examples from Dunne:

Harlequin duck: "Seen well and in good light, the plumage of adult males is unmistakable -- a duck painted in the pattern and style of Pablo Picasso." Great horned owl: "A neckless broad-faced beer keg of a bird topped with the devil's own horns. . . . The expression is sleepy malice -- or just plain malice. . . . Sometimes sits on the ground. Walks with a lumbering sailor's gait." Atlantic puffin: "A portly penguin with the face of a sad-eyed clown." Blue jay: "A curiously shaped bird that looks like it was assembled from leftover parts." Rose-breasted grosbeak: "Crimson-bibbed black-and-white males look like they've been shot through the heart."

Under its common and Latin names, for each bird, Dunne has added an extra title phrase. Northern saw-whet owl: "The Winsome Tiger or 'You just want to put it in your shirt pocket and take it home with you.' " Lesser prairie-chicken: "Chicken Garnished with a Slice of Mango and a Dollop of Raspberry Sherbet." Not that it's all art: He does not omit the known facts of range, behavior, breeding, habitat, and conservation status.

Anyone with less stature than Dunne would probably come in for grumbling by other bird experts for these flights of style. But his stature is such that he has earned the right to say what a bird is like in any words he chooses. His accuracy is not in question. In this book, in an unusual and refreshing manner, he has found a way to meld the benefits of science and the pleasures of art.