Flight Calls
Exploring Massachusetts through its birds
Bluejays (left) and Great Horned Owl (Library of Congress)
I didn’t set out to become a nature writer. Like many “wouldbes” — a term less insulting than “wannabe” — I wanted to be a writer long before I had a clue about what to say or how to say it. I was facile with words. I fantasized fame. I liked the idea of being of writer. For two decades my attempts at writing ranged widely in genre, subject matter, and purpose, from ill-considered to spectacularly silly. I completed some projects, aborted others. Most of the pieces I wrote remain deservedly unpublished. I’m not being modest.
I finally wrote a short story that satisfied me, “Collaborators,” about a woman caught up in a rivalry with her lover’s fictional heroine, and the story was published as a contest award winner in the now defunct journal Negative Capability. Encouraged, I set out to tell the one story I really needed to tell in Sallie’s Children, a long, impassioned novel about interracial love, set within the cultural turmoil of the 1960s. While teaching English at North Shore Community College, I worked on the novel for nearly a decade, sent it off to agents and editors, accumulated rejections, cut and tightened the book, got more rejections, cut more deeply and ruthlessly, and so on. I still believe the novel is worthy, and I’ve decided to give it one last try. If I can’t find a publisher, I’ll self-publish. The main challenge will be letting readers know that the book exists.
Meanwhile, I’d become a midlife birder, exploring Cape Ann and far beyond, and I’d started writing about birds. The beauty, the behavior, and the resourcefulness of birds all captivated me, while birding was transforming me into someone more fully alive in the world, attuned to the sights and sounds all around me. I was also intrigued by what birds have meant to people, whether Native Americans on the shores of Ipswich Bay, European explorers like Samuel Champlain and John Smith, or poets like Emily Dickinson and Mary Oliver. My first pieces were narratives and humor essays — e.g. how not to find rare birds — published in birding magazines. Then I wrote longer essays, blending field experiences with scientific and literary research, and I was heartened to find interest in literary magazines like The Gettysburg Review.
Canada Goose (left) and Indigo Bunting (Library of Congress)
Shenandoah awarded me its non-fiction prize for an essay on dancing birds. My essay “Funny Bird Sex” from The Antioch Review was awarded a 2018 Pushcart Prize. In September 2019 the University of Massachusetts Press published my book Flight Calls: Exploring Massachusetts through Birds, essays and stories connected by a focus on Massachusetts birds and the discovery of my passion for birds.
The book, I hope, offers fresh angles and insights to engage experienced birders, but it was written for anyone with an interest in birds as well as the science of animal behavior, literature about birds, the history of nature study in Massachusetts, and the many wonderful places to explore in our state. Anybody can become a birder: birds are here for us all.
Flight Calls is a culmination of fifteen years of bird writing. The title encapsulates the lure of birds, the pull of attraction to fellow creatures that beckon with sounds not intended for me and compel me to watch as they wing through the air in wild, expressive arcs
Some days I wake amused by the idea that I’ll spend my morning writing about birds. Six years ago, while working on a history of the Brookline Bird Club, I visited the ornithology archives at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. I’d graduated from Harvard, but had never ventured into the museum back in college, when my roommate and I were engrossed in study of our literary heroes — Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Beckett — in a self-taught course we called Sickie Literature.
Had an apparition prophesized then that I would become a bird writer, I would have been stupefied. I do write essays on other subjects, such as “Coming of Old Age in Samoa,” forthcoming in The Missouri Review, but it was through writing about birds that I found my niche. In ecology “niche” denotes both a habitat in which a species is well-fitted to survive, and that species’ role within a community. Within the literary community my niche might be specialized, available only within a limited range, but it’s a habitat in which I seem to have the resources to thrive.
“The beauty, the behavior, and the resourcefulness of birds all captivated me, while birding was transforming me into someone more fully alive in the world.”
Flight Calls takes readers around Massachusetts to watch, hear, and know our hummingbirds, hawks, and herons in the woodlands, meadows, marshes, and coastlines of the Great Marsh, Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cape Cod, the Quabbin wilderness, and Mount Wachusett, but the heart of the book is in Cape Ann, my longtime home. The chapter “Birding a Patch” is about the gratifications of close, regular study of the birds in a single neighborhood, in my case a patch of great natural beauty bordered by the Atlantic Ocean, the Annisquam River, Essex Bay, and Walker Creek.
I describe the birds there, the gabby, calicoed Long-tailed Ducks, the plunge-diving Northern Gannets, but also the natural and cultural history of my patch — the periods of glacial advance when Cape Ann was not a peninsula but a cluster of hills above an icy coastal plain, the millennia during which the Pawtucket people banded in circled campsites by tidal rivers to fish and farm, the many decades after the Revolutionary War when West Gloucester remained near wilderness. The chapter “Watching Gulls with Emerson on Cape Tragabigzanda” combines a winter birding tour of our cape with a history of painters and writers connected to the birds and places we visit: Fitzhenry Lane, Winslow Homer, John Smith, Ralph Waldo Emerson, T. S. Eliot. I open the chapter with a story about my wife Mary finding Bank Swallows breeding in the Wingaersheek dunes, the same swallows that Winslow Homer had painted flying in and out of dunes in an 1873 watercolor. “This is why I love Cape Ann,” I write. “Here you can go birding with history.”
I return to Cape Ann in the final chapter, about the prospects for the birds of Massachusetts. Will there still be whip-poor-wills and towhees singing in West Gloucester a hundred years from now? In the face of climate change and habitat loss, it’s hard to be optimistic, but these birds will have a chance if enough of us are committed to their conservation.
Cape Ann offers fine birding in all seasons, with year-round residents like Carolina Wrens and Great Horned Owls, breeding birds like Baltimore Orioles and Scarlet Tanagers, warblers and other migrants in spring and fall, and waterfowl like the fantastical Harlequin Duck that make our cape a prime destination in the Northeast for watching winter seabirds. Each May I lead a walk around Eastern Point during migration, while several times each winter I lead sea-watching trips on a loop from the Man at the Wheel to the Rockport headlands. These outings, co-sponsored by the Brookline Bird Club and Essex County Ornithological Club, are free and open to all comers, with no advance registration required. The best place to look for seabirds is at sea, and I’m also one of the trip leaders on the annual Cape Ann winter birding boat trip, sponsored in March by the Cape Ann Chamber of Commerce and led by Captain Jay Frontiero of Seven Seas Whale Watch.
Writing Flight Calls has also rekindled my love of teaching, and this January I hope to teach a course on writing creative nonfiction for the Gloucester Writers Center.
▶︎ To order a copy of Flight Calls click here.
