The Bluebird Effect - Uncommon Bonds With Common Birds (2012) - Plot & Excerpts
Magical, beautiful, easy to coast through a chapter at a time overa morning cup of coffee. Julie tells tales of rehabilitating birds over her 20 plus year career as a naturalist living in CT and then OH with her family.Her stunning pencil and watercolor drawings throughout the book are just lovely and really capture the essence of the birds she studies. There are amazing revelations about birds throughout that opens our eyes to many things we would never know.Especially love the story of the 4 hummingbird babies and the gaggle of chimney swifts that she raises and releases. Makes you want to be her, if just for one day. "The Bluebird Effect: Uncommon Bonds with Common Birds" - written by Julie Zickefoose and published in 2012. It's not everyone whose grocery list includes 1,000 crickets and 5,000 mealworms, and whose visit to the human grocery store might involve taking hummingbird nestlings along with her own! Zickefoose is a naturalist, a bird painter, and a licensed wildlife rehabilitator and brings all these skills together in this lovely book. Being an amateur birder myself and a Buckeye as she is, I was familiar with most of her subjects, but awed and amazed by her stories.In addition to the painterly watercolors and sketches which adorn the heavyweight pages, her expressive writing was a delight to read, describing interactions full of "intrigue, the interventions, and the observations," and how these fluttering encounters were "adding motion and music to our lives." It's obvious that birds with their "liquid twitters" and "wheedling pipe of hunger" have a special place in her soul and she is deeply fulfilled by working with them. Who knew that ospreys could recognize individual people or that barn swallows would learn to hover by the electric eyes of doors at big box stores to allow access to their nests inside! Her method of protecting plover chicks from marauding night herons was awesome!Zickefoose has studied birds intensely enough to be able to discern traits and abilities that the journeyman birder might not recognize and if she sometimes assigns human emotions to her avian friends, she has paid her dues to be allowed that privilege. At the "Hotel Zickefoose," the "seed-toting waitress" lives for the moment when her charges reach "that delicate edge of wildness and vigor that can have only one outcome: release." Be sure to check in and enjoy this compelling story.
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Different kind of book. Boy is she into birds.
—Linus
