Review by Choice Review
The author, clearly a birder herself, writes sociologically about birders as beginners, and as birdwatchers, listers, naturalists, and conservationists. A birder may be one or all of these. Cherry recounts many interesting experiences in a birder's ontogeny, how birders meet and greet, and how they talk, share, and compete. She focuses on the birder as a learner, a watcher, and a naturalist who sees and integrates experience and knowledge. Birders develop the "naturalist gaze," seeing details as well as the whole. "Birders filter what they see through what they know." Birders understand the anthropogenic damage to climate, to habitats, to the air and water, and directly to bird populations. In her conclusion, the author sees birders as a force for good, mobilizing in support of birds and habitats. Birds themselves come under scrutiny also, as a "social construction of nature." Birds give an added meaning to the phrase, "wilderness and wildness." Many birders have become citizen scientists, for example through e-BIRD, gathering the very data that has uncovered the causes of birds' declines and habitat degradation. As Cherry claims, birders are a potentially strong conservation block--a movement waiting to be moved. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. --Joanna Burger, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
