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  • To the Curator of Birds
  • Philip F. Gura (bio)

Like some New England Puritan asked to provide an account of the work of grace upon his soul, I can date my epiphany. I was barely a teenager in a November that stands out from all other damp, drizzly Novembers by the horror of its gunshots in Dallas. One afternoon aside a field of unharvested hay I saw a chokecherry tree full of chattering yellow birds. Only as large as Robins, in their aura they seemed immense and surreal, with black on their wings and oversized Finch bills, working their way through fermenting fruit with such dispatch that I watched the ground chalk beneath. I had walked the woods enough to know that, twice as big and amazingly bright, these were not Goldfinches, which at this season would have been attired in duller garb. Against a crystalline autumn sky these birds were startlingly garish—so noisy as to be brash—and unforgettable when, five minutes later, as oblivious of me as I was entranced by them, they flew when the last cherry was gone.

Harbinger of all the other birds that I would see, this visitation transformed my life as completely as though, as John Locke would have it, I had encountered a new simple idea. But at that moment I did not even know what they were, and when I discovered that our town library had no book on the shelf that pictured them, with the librarian’s help I set about compiling a list of natural history museums whose staff, I believed, would eagerly receive my discovery. I sent off several handwritten letters, addressed to the “curator of birds.”

Months passed without any answer, but one day, as mysteriously as the birds themselves, there appeared in the mailbox a letter from the Museum of Natural History in New York City, a few lines, hastily penned by the curator of ornithology. “Undoubtedly Evening Grosbeaks, a large cousin of the Goldfinch. [signed] Dean Amadon.” My next trip to the library yielded Roger Tory Peterson’s field guide, serendipitously returned by the borrower who had checked it out prior to my first foray, and there were my birds! Their visit was not the unusual thing about this episode, it turned out: in severe winters Evening Grosbeaks often wander from northern forests to regions like New England where food is still available. More remarkable was that one of the world’s foremost ornithologists, Dean Amadon, had taken the time to answer a schoolboy’s scrawl.

In the winter of the Grosbeaks, my backyard feeder drew even more unusual, if not quite as striking, visitors from the far north: Boreal or Acadian (or, as they now are called, Brown-Capped) Chickadees. A few days later I mentioned them to a friend’s father because on his living room walls he had lovely bird prints—Menaboni’s, I would learn, given by the artist himself. As I expected, “Deke” [End Page 27] knew something about birds. Before he had begun his family, this linesmen’s supervisor for AT&T had, for years, avidly listed birds in our hometown, been a charter member of its first bird club, and kept voluminous records of the species that he and his friends saw.

The Boreals stayed all winter long, eating suet, peanut butter, and even ripe bananas. Sensing my growing interest in the natural world, Deke began, as spring approached, to take his own son, another neighbor about my age, and me on bird walks throughout the area. He talked about yard lists, year lists, and life lists, and how to record my sightings. He loaned me books in which I could read about new species that I had seen and allowed me to pore through his own field records of fifteen years earlier, in which I eagerly read of species, many of which had become rare, that he had seen in places where we still walked. He taught me bird song, so much and so well that within a year there would be mornings when before daylight we noted forty species without having seen a single one; now, fifty years later, coming upon...

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