10,000 Birds

JANUARY 7, 2014

It’s not like I had forgotten lists created with friends of ‘songs with birds in the lyrics’, my personal favorites being Sondheim’s Green Finch and Linnet Bird and the Beatles’ Blackbird. Nor have I overlooked “sightings” of birds in movies mouthing other birds’ calls.

Birds 205

Birds Egypt Family Eagles 205

10,000 Birds

JUNE 2, 2015

Second, reading about birds courting and parenting brings out the tendency to identify, which leads directly to anthropomorphism, the tendency to assign birds human emotions and thoughts. Brown-headed Cowbird itself gets its own section in the Blackbirds and Orioles chapter. We simply refuse to squee. Some people love books like that.

Eggs 263

Eggs Family 2006 New York 263

10,000 Birds

JUNE 6, 2023

Reading this chapter, I thought back to the emotional conversations I, a white Jewish woman, had with birding friends back in May 2020, mostly online (remember, it was still the pandemic). But before that, it was these feathered dreams that would carry me across the globe on adventures, in search of birds in faraway places. (p.

Emotional 219

Emotional Birds Minneapolis Nepal 219

10,000 Birds

MARCH 30, 2024

Hearts racing and tears of emotion welling up in our eyes! We checked out the shrubs for songbirds while returning to the car and were rewarded with a displaying Red-winged Blackbird. The emotional high of the owl was never going to give this lake a fair chance but even so I would say this spot was the least attractive of the day.

Ducks 149

Ducks Emotional Cattle Owls 149

10,000 Birds

MAY 5, 2021

And what an attractive cover it has, filled with blackbirds against a blue and purple sky. There’s something off-putting about her prose – it’s immensely earnest, precious, and by turns giddy and despairing (“If there is a sadness as big as the galaxy, I feel it now”), so that neither of those latter two emotions is very believable.

Cleveland 249

Cleveland Emotional Whales Whaling 249