"The Life of the Skies"

In the current issue of Birding there is a review of 2 books by NYCity birders which begins with a complimentary reference to Jonathan Rosen's The Life of the Skies. Birding at the End of Nature. I read Rosen some months ago after seeing a review in the NYT Sunday book section. This, it turned out, was the 3rd book I bought after it was recommended there and that I suspect was poorly read, certainly not read completely or carefully by the reviewer. [Later I asked for some books for Christmas, also on the basis of  NYT Book Reviews; these too were a disappointment, especially The Only Son about J. J. Rousseau's brother which is in fact a novelized description of French sexual libertinism in the 18th century]. The Birding article remarked how  The Life of the Skies was "meticulously researched". Which it may have been, particularly in places not having much to do with birds; it is somewhat of a "cribbed" book. But rather than a book about birding or the end of nature, it is more about Rosen's emotional life (ex. pp 290ff.) and even there I am suspicious, for ex. towards the end, when he is birding in Israel, he describes a search for a rare little owl and goes into a discourse about the unsettling effect the owl has on him, a discourse that could be more credible if made by an unsophisticated Arab for whom owls are symbolic of dark forces. Earlier, in the company of a local expert, he goes birding in a reserve, but rather than telling us about the birds seen or not seen, it is more about the threats to Israel, etc. Similarly he mentions twice that his rabbi alerts him to the arrival of warblers in Central Park, but we don't actually hear about Rosen doing any birding or what warblers he saw. [In the documentary on the "Central Park Effect" Rosen mentions that someone at lunch mentioned that the warblers would have arrived and thus he went to look for them, but unlike others in the film he doesn't actually bird.]

Large sections are taken up with speculations about Walt Whitman, Audubon and Thoreau. The latter leads to an observation about Thoreau's imagination of what he might see through his spyglass if there was anything to see , like the the nest of a hawk or the hawks flying above it (p.87). This, to me, could well be taken as an observation about Rosen's description of his own own birding experiences.
Looking through the book now, I notice my many notes (some hasty, some intemperate) in the margins or simple question marks, thus on p. 84 he states that it took Thoreau a long time "to achieve his eminence because, when he started, there weren't any birdwatchers." This is somewhat of an odd statement that seems inspired by the modern notion of a "birdwatcher" of which there may be millions in the USA alone, but fails to do justice to all the birdwatchers (naturalists) before Thoreau or among his contemporaries, the names of which or even the writings may well have been known to the educated in New England (and were given by ornithologists to newly discovered birds). And who among modern birdwatchers thinks of Thoreau as a forerunner, let alone as an eminent one? Having read most of Th., I certainly don't, for birds were not the specific object of Thoreau's curiosity which was directed at natural phenomena in general.

Rosen lets himself be guided by the general acceptance of Audubon's paintings as being true to life, which is mostly correct if we think of them as documents of species. But when I looked at them, I become mind full that he painted dead birds, stuffed and held in form by wires and what have you. The effect is sometimes unnatural and even weird. And while A's ability to depict makes him into an artist, does it make him a poet? (p. 288).

I also think Rosen makes too much of Whitman's poem on the mockingbird by projecting his own reader's response into the lines of Wh. I often have the feeling when reading literary analysis essays that the writer wishes that he himself had written the poem discussed: it would have been better (longer and more tedious?). Interestingly enough Audubon has several paintings of snakes and bird nests, incl. one of mockingbirds and I wondered whether Rosen should have pursued whether Whitman knew the Audubon paintings and may have "colored" his own observations accordingly. There too I have some notes and queries, for ex. one on Rosen's statement that Medieval people must have seen things in perspective "but didn't draw in perspective because, for some strange reason, they had forgotten how, which is another way of saying they didn't care."(p.63) The reason isn't strange at all. Vasari gives us one which is embroidered on by Gibbons. It can be summed up in general terms as: Early Christian obedience to the Commandment against images as well as the Barbarian invasions that destroyed examples of classical (3-dimensional art as well as wall paintings with landscapes in perspective) combined to remove classical (i.e. non-Christian) models and prescribed "symbolism," the object of which was to picture items and persons as representing ideas. (And there are exceptions, St. Cuthbert in Durham Cathedral, ptd in the early 12th cent. appears to have a 3-D face as if the painter "stood" a little to the left of the model). Symbolism might even be thought of as transcending the physical into the life of the mind. And they certainly did care, namely NOT to picture anything "natural." By itself  this would not diminish the value of Rosen's textual analysis, but as there are other references to vague knowledge remembered from a college course in several places, I became sceptical.

But what does all this have to do with the Life of the Skies (even the poetic imagination of Audubon or Whitman, while flights of fancy, remains earthbound, rooted in human vocabulary); or with the End of Nature that was not perceived by 19th century observers and not examined by Rosen in fact , but as asides (for. ex. on pp. 45ff., and see p. 290)?