Jack Gedney - The Private Lives of Public Birds: Learning to Listen to the Birds Where We Live

Im a serious backyard birder with a library of over a hundred bird books. Gedneys is now one of my top favorites. His lyrical and deeply felt insights, in particular about bird language, enable us to see that common birds are anything but.

AMY TAN, author of The Joy Luck Club

The Private Lives of Public Birds is an affectionate love song to our most familiar feathered neighbors. Grounded in science but watered by the heart of a poet, this intimate and personal look at the lives of the birds we see every day invites us to slow down and look again.

JOHN MUIR LAWS, author of The Laws Guide to Drawing Birds

Gedney has opened wide a portal for any and all, novice or expert, to enter a world of immediate avian wonder. With the help of ornithologists and poets and authors from the pastbe they William Leon Dawson, Henry David Thoreau, or creation stories of the Western MonoGedney gathers together nuggets of goldfinch and treasures in feathers to be enjoyed whether we are gazing out our office window, stuck in traffic, or actively seeking.

KEITH HANSEN, author of Hansens Field Guide to the Birds of the Sierra Nevada

Jack Gedneys book mingles science, story, and poetry, inviting readers to become immersed in the world of close-to-home birdlifenot to just look at birds, but to look again with attention, stillness, study, and curiosity. This book awakens all of our senses, making every step outside the door an opportunity for joy and belonging.

LYANDA LYNN HAUPT, author of Rooted and Mozarts Starling

What fun to follow Jacks curiosity as he bikes and birds and reads, bringing together dozens of human voices to deepen his essays, from Miwok and Yokuts stories, to a range of writers such as Li Bai, Kurt Vonnegut, Mary Austin, Bernd Heinrich, and even Joanna Newsom.

ALLEN FISH, director of the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory, Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy

I cant remember the last time I started smiling during a preface, couldnt put the book down, continued smiling through chapter one (on the brown scratcher), two (the blue squawker), and beyond. What a delight! This book is filled with such wonderful perspectives on the supposedly ordinary birds all around us.

DONALD KROODSMA, author of The Singing Life of Birds

Copyright 2022 by Jack Gedney

All rights reserved. No portion of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from Heyday.

Vulture, copyright 1963 by Garth Jeffers and Donnan Jeffers; from THE SELECTED POETRY OF ROBINSON JEFFERS by Robinson Jeffers. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Oda al picaflor, NUEVAS ODAS ELEMENTALES Pablo Neruda, 1956, and Fundacin Pablo Neruda.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gedney, Jack, 1989- author.

Title: The private lives of public birds : learning to listen to the birds where we live / Jack Gedney.

Description: Berkeley, California : Heyday, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021046932 (print) | LCCN 2021046933 (ebook) | ISBN 9781597145749 (paperback) | ISBN 9781597145756 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Birds--California--Identification.

Classification: LCC QL684.C2 G43 2022 (print) | LCC QL684.C2 (ebook) | DDC 598.09794--dc23/eng/20211020

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021046932

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021046933

Cover Art: Anna Ku Park

Cover Design: Ashley Ingram

Interior Design/Typesetting: Ashley Ingram

Published by Heyday

P.O. Box 9145, Berkeley, California 94709 (510) 549-3564

heydaybooks.com

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Lena

SPEAKERS

SINGERS

VISIONS

This is a book about fifteen familiar neighborhood birds of California. None are rare, all are found in a large portion of the state, and each of them brightens up my trip to work in a midsize town of Northern California.

This is also a book about different ways of seeing, hearing, and thinking about the natural world that will allow any encounter with a bird to add richness to your life. I often discuss ecology and evolution, because these are helpful tools for making sense of what the birds are up to and why they are the way they are. The objectivity of science helps prevent erroneous interpretation. I also often invite poets or opinionated old naturalists to share their points of view, because subjectivity is an invaluable ingredient in enthusiasm. My agenda is for greater daily human happiness through birds, and Ive personally found the ideal prescription for this to be a good strong dose of both knowledge and instinctive delight.

Aldo Leopold found it enlightening to reflect on his plant biases. This gave him an invigorating awareness of the fact that while he loved all trees, he was in love with pines. Lin Yutang gives a similar weight to the subjective in his definition of education as the development of good taste, rather than the accumulation of measurable knowledge. I hope this book will help you develop a taste for birds, and a taste in birdsto find the birds you are in love with.

California Towhee, Melozone crissalis

What bird means California to me?

We have specialties such as condors, California thrashers, and yellow-billed magpies, but for most of us such birds are not part of our daily lives, and nor are they for me. There are others more familiar, but which have less particularly Californian flavor mourning doves or robins, for instance. Among our most intimate of neighbors, there is also a smaller set of brilliant birds that are more distinctive to our state, such as the lovely little lyrist miscalled the lesser goldfinch or the always scheming scrub-jay, planter of the oaks. These are birds I endlessly admire, and would regret to leave behind.

But I dont choose my closest friends for their musical inventiveness, or measure my sympathies by a scale of intelligence and industry. You can be plain and unmusical, with no claims to genius, and yet receive my unstinted affection. There are some people who simply stand for home, who are inseparably intermingled with a place and with ourselves. There is a bird like this for me: the brown bird, or California towhee, a friend who never fades away.

Outside of the mountains, almost every yard and city park in the state has its resident pair, two clay-colored, clumsy figures poking around the path as they search for fallen seeds. Youve surely seen them: oversized and long-tailed sparrows, almost uniformly plain in their earthy suits save for a spot of rust beneath their tails. Towhees hardly hide, but hop around in imperturbable placidity, sedate and unalarmed. They are weak flyers who dont migrate, but stay put throughout the year. A few are found in Oregon, but the overwhelming majority of California towhees indeed belong to California, when you count both the upper and the lower. For millions of Californians, this is the bird of home.