The Armchair Birder Goes Coastal

January 30, 2012
In this sequel to The Armchair Birder, Yow ventures from his porch to take readers hunting for shorebirds on islands and wildlife refuges in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Alabama, hosted and guided mainly by friends of friends—“not crabby, misanthropic stay-at-homes like me, but kindly, generous folks who like to watch birds...show new species to people who might not have seen ’em yet.” In his folksy, humorous, and erudite style, Yow admires the “beautiful and strange” roseate spoonbills at Florida’s “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge, appreciates the cormorant as “the hardest-working bird on the waterfront,” and dubs the royal tern “America’s bird”: “loud, brawling, and pleasure-loving but pious when it comes to ‘traditional values’; and erratically parental.” His tales are supplemented with information about the birds’ feeding, mating, rearing, migration habits, and species health, drawn from the writings of such experts as John James Audubon, Rachel Carson, Arthur Cleveland Bent, and contributors to Birds of North America Online. Yow also includes amusing auxiliary footnotes, ranging from pronunciations of bird names (“does plover rhyme with lover or rover?”) and the eviction of an African-American community from what is now Georgia’s Harris Neck Land Trust, to a hot-off-the-presses taxonomy update. Agent: Sally McMillan, Sally Hill McMillan and Associates Inc.