Book Review: Feather Trails

Image: The cover of the book is a nature shot with a light blue sky background and a snow covered branch sticking out from the bottom left. A peregrine falcon- a bird with a dark mask, pointed wings, bright yellow legs and around eyes and bill and barred belly and wings- launches themself off of the branch to the right. Across the top in blue is "Feather Trails," below that in yellow, "A Journey of Discover Among Endangered Birds," below that in white, "One Conservationist's effort to save the peregrine falcon, hawaiian crows, and california condor," and in the bottom right in yellow, "Sophie A. H. Osborn, foreword by Pete Dunne."

This is going to be a ranting, rambling review full of animal liberationist opinions as it's impossible for it not to be with how many feelings, some old and some new, were awakened by this beautiful book. The author and I have many agreements and a few disagreements, so be careful not to project all of my opinions onto her writing if I happen to convey this jumbled mess without enough organization. Sophie A. H. Osborn's Feather Trails is a standout in the genres it spans (memoir, nature writing, science, and more.) The writing is excellent, engrossing, and drew me in completely, making me feel like I was there. Her ability to immerse the reader with details about locations, visuals, feelings, experiences, etc is strengthened by her simultaneous ponderings on what things are like for the individual birds of the species she worked to support and conserve. Her passion about birds and conservation is clear and reading this book added to my own passion and understanding.

Learning Osborn's history with peregrine falcons had me thinking of every time I have had the luxury of seeing this no longer endangered bird with the awe of knowing they may never have had a chance without people like her and the challenging work they did. The stories of the alala crows tore at and touched my heart. You can tell from my name that I have a soft spot for corvids and to know these crafty creatures are extinct in the wild is devastating. Learning how the remaining individuals in captivity still maintain some wildness and ability to enjoy life makes the reality easier to digest. The section on the California condors was by far the hardest, yet still full of beauty. The pitfalls and absolute cruelty and callousness of so many humans, how they killed so many birds, and damaged conservation efforts over and over has infuriated and haunted me since. 

Frankly, I already found the propaganda of hunters all being the "greatest conservationists" to be gross. Taking a history where regulations had to be created and rigidly enforced because hunting drove many species to, or close to, extinction (including deer, canada geese, and other now abundant species,) then rebranding the entire story with hunters as the heroes is dishonest at best. (Not to mention how current subsets of conservation that are partly funded by hunting licenses end abruptly when their ability to kill who they want when they want, or the profits of loggers and ranchers, are affected.) After Osborn telling the stories of lead poisonings, individual condor by condor, all dying extremely prematurely, while the NRA and "conservationist" hunters clung (and still cling) to lead shot because "gun rights" frankly made me so infuriated by this hunting propaganda that I could barely breathe. For the record, Osborn herself does not claim to be anti-hunting, just anti-lead ammunition. Osborn's stories of individual birds, their relationships, explorations and adventures, and the short lives they did get to lead made out for a book that is not purely trauma. However, it is never easy to read sensitive, thoughtful, honest accounts of how we got here, where we have succeeded, and where we have failed. That honesty leads me to my next point.

I often go in to books about the greater than human world open-minded but with low expectations. There are tons of books out there that disappoint, not so much in their lack of research and information, but in their objectification of their subjects. I am so tired of reading books that treat birds and other animals as a monolith of beings with no personalities and only a single minded focus (usually reproduction.) I did not know much about Osborn before this book (because I am out of touch, she is in fact a rather large name in ornithology and conservation.) I was pleasantly surprised by how she told these stories for a variety of reasons.

Despite sometimes falling into the dreaded "it" designation that many humans continue to give animals, Osborn focuses on each bird that she worked with and knew as an individual being. We learn about their personalities, how they interact with one another in different ways, how human interference affects things, and so on. She also does not shy away from the ethical conundrums of working with endangered birds. While I don't always agree with her, I found so much value in her discussion of the realities of how righting human wrongs can be very complicated. From DDT and lead contamination to the introduction of feral cats and killing birds to feed other birds, Osborn does not shy away from discussing her feelings and overall ethics (topics often woefully absent in science literature.) She discusses her uneasiness with the practice of killing quail to save falcons and how seeing a feral cat be killed to protect other species taught her to transition her own cats to be indoor only. I did not notice her analyzing the killing of cows for condors, though, which I think could have pushed the ethical convo further when discussing animal agribusiness and its contributions to climate change and species extinction- especially given the focus on hunting (which presently has less overall impact than animal exploitation agribusiness.) Not only do the wastefulness, greenhouse gases, land use, groundwater pollution, etc, cause issues, but many vulture species have become endangered due to poisoning from drugs given to cows, but I digress.

She discusses the human fault for introducing non native species in much more honest ways than many scientists, though in my opinion she still put too much blame on said species at times for endangering other animals by condoning their slaughter. The big picture is more complicated than that. In reality, humans (aside from introducing said species in the first place) have far worse impacts than any feral cat. Overfishing/hunting, habitat destruction, pollutions, animal agribusiness, etc are all massive threats to birds and other animals. Even the first humans who traveled outside Africa to colonize other continents began to cause imbalances, extinctions, etc upon arrival (no shade to folks just trying to survive without this knowledge centuries ago.) With European colonization, industrialization, etc, those problems were intensely magnified. Yet, humans believe that we and our luxuries are worth more, so we call the other animals "invaders" and blame it all on them. Osborn is unafraid to have this discussion which I truly appreciate, even if she and I disagree on a fraction of the solutions.

Osborn also is willing to acknowledge the ethical conundrums in terms of conservation, study, and breeding of endangered species. She does not shy away from the reality that handling birds is stressful. I have seen bird banding posts with people taking selfies with terrified animals or claiming they're "smilin for the camera!" (I support banding research efforts, for the record, and respect the efforts of scientists to reduce stress as much as possible. Unfortunately, nonconsensual contact with other animals is sometimes needed for conservation and research. I also support questioning everything we do without another animal's consent and how we characterize those actions.) Osborn discusses the practice of separating animals who choose one another as partners in order to place them with another animal with a higher chance of breeding. This is a practice I oppose, but I see the logic. She does not discuss artificial insemination as much as one should as it ranges from stressful to horrific depending on the species. I think zoos playing a part increases the problem (reminder: wherein the majority of animals are not endangered and are bred/purchased just for entertainment/profit.) Zoos tend to want to breed species so that they have more of that species to display in captivity, despite the fact that the stresses of the zoo tend to hinder various species interest in breeding. You can see the difference between zoo-run conservation and other types not driven by profit in this book and elsewhere. Even so, the Alala crow efforts are important and sometimes a zoo will hold the only members of an endangered or extinct-in-the-wild species available and thus one must work with them in order to participate.

In terms of herself, Osborn is excellent at describing her strengths, shortcomings, successes, and mistakes along the way. She discusses being a woman in the sciences and which people were her allies vs which ones treated her as subservient. She interrogates her own biases and examines her feelings. Rather than drawing conclusions that all emotion is bad in science, she examines which way her emotions may lead her and why. I don't know if she realized she was using this sort of wisdom around feelings or if it is just evident to me as an outsider. Afterall, isn't the desire to care for and conserve an entire species partly an emotional one? Humans are an extremely emotional species, much like many other animals. I think we benefit far more from these discussions than we do from humans who think that emotion has no place in the sciences (as if that would even be possible with us involved.) But, again, I digress.

I've written plenty and have filled this review with so much of what this book brought up for me because I haven't been able to stop thinking about it every day since I finished. I hope that Osborn's style is a trend in writing that will continue in science, conservation, nature, etc topics. It not only draws people into the worlds of other animals, but it pushes us more towards possible solutions. The planet would not have lost so many of its species with more efforts like that of Osborn. With her and those like her still out there, maybe many still have a chance.

This was also posted to my goodreads and storygraph.

Book Review: Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions

Image: the cover of the book is a painting by Joshua Mays of a Black woman from the chest up. She is looking to the right and the highlights on her right side fade into light blue with white dots swirled throughout. There are illustrations of purple thistles and flowers behind her and around her shoulders. At the bottom center is a grey pigeon like bird with a red-orange forehead. Across the top in white letters is "world fantasy award winner Nalo Hopkinson," and across the bottom, "Jamaica Ginger and other Concoctions."

Nalo Hopkinson ranks in the top tier of my favorite scifi and speculative fiction authors. I have read most of her excellent novels, but she stands out as an author whose short story collections actually end up being my favorites in her repertoire. Falling in Love with Hominids is one of the best short story collections I have read by either a single or multiple authors. Naturally, I was excited to see Tachyon putting out a new collection by Hopkinson: Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions. Nisi Shawl also aided Hopkinson and cowrote one of the stories in the collection as well.

While this collection did not hit as hard as Falling in Love with Hominids for me personally, it is still a strong collection that spans genres as Hopkinson is known to do. There are a couple stories that can be found in other collections, but many of these are ones that were written for specific projects- including a TED talk fiction performance by multiple authors gathered by Neil Gaiman- that are not so easily accessible. I really enjoyed that they included Nalo's words before each story, describing where the stories came from and what her writing process was. It enriched the experience of reading the book. Her description of the aforementioned TED story entry was the longest and most interesting in its discussion of how the stereotypical boundaries of science fiction must often be surpassed when marginalized characters are present. Hopkinson is also excessively humble in some of her assessments of stories. There were ones that were not her favorite that I ended up liking quite a lot.

The best stories in the collection in terms of my own tastes were Broad Dutty Water: A Sunken Story inspired by a Jamaican folksong and real life horrors of flooding, the satirical Clap Back telling truth through fiction about exploitative arts, Repatriation about a very special type of cruise, and my absolute favorite San Humanité which somehow, despite being only two pages, gripped me and left me craving an expansion of it into a full novel. I do not think I have ever felt that way from a 2 page story before. There are plenty of other excellent stories that people who are fans of all sorts of genres will enjoy as well.

Nalo Hopkinson is not just groundbreaking in her telling of stories with characters not often centered in SSFF genres, though that is definitely a draw for me. She is a damned good writer who continues to evolve with time and this collection is a good example of the many places her fiction has gone. I look forward to the next entry in her writing career, hopefully sooner rather than later.

This was also posted to my goodreads and storygraph.

Book Review: Meet the Neighbors

Image: The cover of the book is a blue background with a welcome mat at the bottom center. Superimposed on top of the mat are images of animals- a salamander, tortoise, goose, bear, racoon, donkey, sparrow, deer, and blackbird. Across the top in light yellow is "Meet the Neighbors" and below that in white, "Animal Minds and Life in a More-Than-Human World"

Brandon Keim's excellent book Meet the Neighbors seems to be one that suffers from a title and cover that don't quite match what is inside. (Though, I do love the subheading phrase "more-than-human worlds.") It's strange that the idiom, "don't judge a book by its cover" is still so popular when it is arguably less practiced today than it ever was given the wide reach of the internet and availability of graphic design. The welcome mat with all of the animals on it resembles a child's nature show to me, but Keim did not write a cutesie book about animals as one-dimensional cartoon characters. I assume the title and design were created to reach as wide an audience as possible- anyone who likes other-than-human animals and wants fun facts about them. This strategy sometimes works for sales but often results in disappointment by readers who expected something lighter.

Keim's book is grounded in reality and is written with great sensitivity, deep thought, and a level of honesty I often do not encounter in these kinds of texts- even from those whose entire goal is to de-center humans in discussions about other animals. This is not a buzzfeed-esque fun-fact book (though there are certainly many fun facts and heartwarming stories within) nor is it a book focused solely on more-than-human animal traits. The parts that mostly focused on facts about animals were the beginning sections of the book which I thought could have used more organization. This initially left me worried that I might be reading another run-of-the-mill book of animal facts, which is just fine, but moving forward took me into another world entirely. This book is includes a mixture of general info and research about other animal minds and experiences as well as discussion about how humans treat and view fellow creatures. The latter can make it tough to read at times. However, even as a person who generally has a hard boundary against reading detailed accounts of animal cruelty and exploitation, I encourage folks to push through those parts. I make exceptions to this rule when the information is used to make larger, complex points and to combat common knowledge in important ways that cannot be done accurately without including said details. Basically, when it makes me think about things in ways I had not before, I will make my way through it. I believe this book does this. It does so in ways that are exceptional in comparison to others in the genre. 

We are currently in a place, at least in much of western culture, where it is super cool to talk about climate change, but not to actually take responsibility for it. It is super cool to discuss amazing fun facts about other animals, as long as we always keep them a step below us and don't challenge the ways we exploit them. It is super cool to combat threats to endangered species, including blaming other species introduced by us, as long as the threats combatted aren't human (you know, the main threat.) Even in far left circles, these kinds of neoliberal and reactionary ways of thinking are common in regards to nonhuman animals. It's even fashionable to tokenize human struggles in reasoning as to why other species do not deserve respect and consideration. This book forces the reader to confront all of these anthropocentric biases and more. Keim acknowledges the great importance of the little bits of happiness we can gain from Dodo videos while also acknowledging that we "live in a world of wounds," as he said when he generously joined VINE book club last month. Keim also grapples with conflicts and questions that are often left out on the more liberatory side of things, such as when humans should intervene to help other animals and what kind of interventions are more wasteful or disruptive than they are helpful. He consistently asks the question- what would an individual from this species think or want? He ponders things such as the differences in opinion bears vs salmon might have in regards to habitat management and how humans choose which species to focus on helping or admiring. The most illuminating parts of the book for me personally, were those that discussed introduced/non-native, "overpopulated," and/or species labeled as "pests." I had not even realized just how much bias I had internalized about certain dilemmas even as a 18 year die hard (collective liberation) vegan with a ton of animal rescue experience who knows that these things are more complicated that the anthropocentric ways they are presented. 

This book is what I was hoping the the book Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains would have been. Even though MTN is not entirely about these species and conflicts, it tells multiple sides of the story in honest ways as much as a human can attempt to without being able to interview other species. I had no idea, for instance, that introduced (non-native) donkeys had rewilded in many places and helped other species survive through things like oasis digging in deserts. I had heard of "judas goats," but never knew about "judas donkeys," which were only mentioned in a footnote, but are truly one of the most heart wrenching examples of cruelty I have read about. I can't stop thinking about them, but do not regret learning this as part of the full story. I have read countless texts that explain how rats and feral cats threatened island nesting birds, which insisted that killing all of them was the only solution. Those texts neglected to mention that humans overfishing, habitat destruction, and killing of the ocean were countless times worse for said birds and everyone else. Keim also discussed how said purge of feral cats was also used to reduce competition with foxes, only to find that foxes at more threatened birds than the cats (who ate more rodents.) The culling of introduced pigs ended up taking away food from golden eagles, who then turned on the foxes, which then meant the eagles had to be "managed." I am a birder and often see people patting themselves on the back when telling people to keep their cats indoors (which I agree with for the record,) but will attack anyone who even questions how our actions affect birds (outside of the abstract or pointing the finger at other human groups- usually in oppressive ways.) We learn that feral cats are the "top killers" of birds when they aren't. We are. But, many writers (outside of animal rights and liberation niche texts) are encouraged not to talk about this as the reader needs the ability to channel the upset about what is happening onto someone else. Keim doesn't fall into that trap.

Keim also did a lot of research and got a lot of big names to interview. Bobby Corrigan on rodents for example. Again, the way he approached the book exceeds what you often find in nature and animal literature. He interviews scientists, environmentalists, lawyers, wildlife "management" services, philosophers, naturalists, animal sanctuary founders, zoo employees, and so on. He also presents one of the most honest sections on hunting and fishing- particularly westernized hunting that rebranded itself as "conservationist" (after hunting drove many species to, or near to, extinction.) I don't know if I have ever read a text that acknowledged the horrors hunters have committed, the trouble with ecosystem imbalance caused by overpopulation of certain species (and harm to other species,) the other human activities that often cause more harm but get less attention/ire than hunting (such as urbanization,) the conservation efforts of a subset of hunters, and how those conservation efforts ultimately serve hunters, ranchers, and loggers more than other animals or ecosystems (by prioritizing sport, profits, trophies, and species hunters want to kill even at cost of true balance and other species harmed by their "conservation" practices.) Keim even calls out the permission fallacy and idea of animals "giving their lives" as a way to redirect from the reality that their lives are taken. He is not claiming taking a life is always wrong, on the contrary, it is sometimes a necessity including for other species. But, he combats this view usually touted by people romanticizing hunting by claiming animals are super into being shot or stabbed for conservation, tradition, sport, trophy, food, or all of the above. It's very rare to find that level of honesty and diligent research on a topic so sensitive to many people on all sides. Keim truly seemed more interested in understanding the dilemma than taking a side. 

As a bird nerd, I learned so many new things about birds from this book. Some were depressing and far more were fascinating. Yet, he also has me thinking hard about what species I am fascinated by and how that affects my actions. I have lots of photos of birds eating insects and fishes. While I have definitely felt for these animals, especially when that damned ring-billed gull held that squirming fish for ages before finally killing them, what is it about birds that attracts me? And how does that affect my actions? I'm not saying I have never considered these things, but Keim gave me new ways to think about them. One might think based on what I have said here that there is a punishing way to these thought processes, but on the contrary, I actually found Keim's outlook freeing. It is often honesty, however painful, that is much less anxiety inducing in the long run. This book allows me to see myself as part of this world- an animal among many other animals- and to examine what that means to me.

As you may be able to tell, I could write a book on this book. I want to leave some surprises for the reader as well. I highly recommend Meet the Neighbors and I hope that if you find your expectations dashed a bit, that you can move forward and take what else the text has to offer because there is a lot here that I have rarely found elsewhere.

This was also posted to my goodreads and storygraph.