Book Review: The Birds of Heaven

Title: The Birds of Heaven

Author: Peter Matthiessen

Date: 2001

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux

ISBN: 0-374-19944-2

Length: 300 pages of text plus illustrations, foreword, afterword, charts, maps, 31 pages of endnotes, and 15 pages of index

Illustrations: maps, drawings, and full-color paintings on glossy inserts

Quote: “Who cares about cranes?”

In India, Peter Matthiessen visited a crane preserve where people offered white millet to a flock of demoiselle cranes twice a day in a fenced enclosure. The birds flew in over the fence; though dignified rather than greedy about taking food, they can easily fly fifty feet up into the air. The fence was to keep “hogs, dogs, and children” from stealing the millet. The birds are pretty, smaller than our whooping cranes, mostly black with luxuriant white plumes and reddish eyes. Their English species name, like the Latin species name virgo, compares them to young ladies; they are both daintier and showier than other crane species. Despite the daily offerings of grain, the cranes need greens, too, and frequently steal plants from people’s kitchen gardens. Matthiessen concentrated on the birds rather than on people, who were evidently hungry, yet committed by a quasi-religious vow to save this edible grain for the birds.

People around the world care deeply about cranes. Matthiessen cares about cranes, enough that, with the help of large groups of people who also cared abut cranes, he was able to visit several exotic places to observe the big birds. The Birds of Heaven reminisces about his trips to observe cranes in Siberia, Mongolia, India, Tibet, China, Japan, Korea, Australia, equatorial Africa, South Africa, England, and back to North America. He meets Siberian cranes migrating through other Asian countries, red-crowned cranes (Grus japonensis) in many places outside Japan, demoiselle cranes, white-naped cranes, Sarus cranes, brolga cranes, wattled cranes, African crowned cranes, Eurasian or “common” cranes, sandhill cranes, whooping cranes, and the “true” blue cranes of Africa. (He is not interested in the birds nicknamed “blue cranes” in Scotland, Ireland, or Australia, which are actually herons.)

I have yet to read a bird book whose author did not assert that the species or family of interest to the author were special. Specialness is, to a considerable degree, in the eye of the beholder. Matthiessen does not convince me that cranes are more interesting, more attractive, or more deserving in any way than the other big showy birds many people consider special, the swans, geese, eagles, loons, and herons. But why should he? All he needs to do is convince me that a book of facts about the different species of cranes around the world can be interesting to read. At that he succeeds. Packed with information about places, people, other animals and plants, poetry and even politics as well as cranes, this book offers hour after hour of reading pleasure.

Matthiessen’s longer-range goal is to convince readers that cranes are worth preserving. Until readers consider the practical reasons why cranes need our help, and what helping them would involve, he’s preaching to the choir. Cranes may not make everyone’s Top 100 list of favorite bird species, but extinction is forever, and we need all the birds, even seagulls and vultures and Central Park pigeons.

What made cranes symbols of love, beauty, and good luck was apparently the loyalty some cranes show to their families. Although they’re not known for courage, cranes have been known to fight, sometimes to the death, defending their mates from attackers. Arguably among the least intelligent of all birds, cranes have also been said to keep on trying to warm and protect their mates’ long-dead bodies.

Cranes have been known to commit their loyalty to “mates” that don’t belong to their species or even to their family. In the 1980s a cage-bred whooping crane in Maryland, known as Texie, fell in love with one of the senior scientists at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. Having committed herself to this man, she was completely uninterested in eligible male whooping cranes. Some female birds (I’ve observed this even in bantam hens) will not produce eggs until they have bonded with an eligible male, and the crane Texie was one of them. Texie’s body would not produce eggs until the man of her choice put on a plumed costume and hopped around her cage in an imitation of a whooping crane’s courtship dance. Although he tried to recruit younger men to dance for Texie in his place, Texie knew whom she wanted; one year, when her man was in bed with a long complicated case of flu for most of the early spring, Texie absolutely refused to lay eggs. Once her tiny bird brain had convinced itself that her chosen mate was responding to her charms, Texie would produce eggs and could be artificially inseminated, so her eggs hatched...but she still had no instinctive clue as to how to raise her young, so her offspring had to be brought up by semi-tame sandhill cranes.

Cranes are omnivores, not fierce and solitary carnivores like herons. They are still big, strong birds with formidable beaks. Cranes protect their territory by, among other things, eating young birds of other species; in Flight of the Snow Geese the cranes were the “villains,” the predators who gobbled up goslings whenever they had a chance. Matthiessen admits that, in captivity, cranes can be vicious. Red-crowned and Siberian cranes are famous for “hostility not only toward their keepers but toward prospective mates, which are often penned separately to prevent their deaths.” Not all cranes need to become sexually obsessed with humans to become tame; Australia’s brolga cranes were nicknamed “native companions” by Englishmen who saw them following native people about, but they can hurt people who get too close. Crane fanciers, like Matthiessen, seem to admire the birds’ “fierceness.”

Of course, the case could be made that humans deserve hostile treatment from cranes. Not only have we kept them in cages; in many cases we’ve made it necessary that they be kept in cages in order to keep a few of the species alive, after we’ve destroyed their habitat. Few humans have intentionally done any harm to cranes. Only a few species have ever, usually during periods of famine, been considered edible. Many things humans consider beneficial just happen to be fatal to cranes, who don’t have enough innate common sense to adapt to human encroachments as well as geese, herons, and eagles are beginning to do. Cranes attach themselves to one mate, and one place for each stage of their annual migration route; if anything happens to the mate or to any of the places where the crane spends its time, it seems, the bird is unable to make any alternate plans, and may not survive. Since humans have no instinct to adjust our house-building, marsh-draining, dam-building behavior for the emotional comfort of large dim-witted birds, the species appear to be on a collision course.

Matthiessen observes many other people and animals, and even some plant species, as well as cranes. He dutifully deplores the way China, having lagged behind the U.S. in adopting “modern” (inefficient, high-emissions) technology), now lags behind the U.S. in developing a “Green” sort of disenchantment with mines, dams, and factories. In this obligatory warble Matthiessen inadvertently makes a political point: no school of political philosophy can be blamed for either infatuation with machinery or Green disillusionment with machinery. In both capitalist and socialist countries people become infatuated with technology that they think will serve their needs, then turn against the same technology when they see the harm it does. The greater success of more free-market-based economies has merely allowed the more capitalist countries to go through this process first.

Possibly 2001 was too early for Matthiessen to make one observation about China that has been made increasingly ever since. Computer manufacturers advertise that computer parts are recycled, but, since the parts are toxic, nobody wants to recycle computer parts in North America. So when your electronics succumb to planned obsolescence, or you succumb to advertisements for newer gadgets, your old gadgets will be shipped to China, where they will be disassembled and “recycled” by people who have been too poor to care about carcinogens for many generations. Tots will suck some of the toxins off their thumbs before remaining toxins are washed into the rivers that run down into the Yangtze, where computer “recycling” may have contributed to the extinction of the Yangtze River dolphins. When you think about recycling computers in even a slightly informed way, it’s hard not to go all Objectivist and start nervously chanting “Better the Chinese than us,” but your Green soul won’t be satisfied with that for very long. I care about Chinese wildlife, and other wildlife on a round world; therefore I own only secondhand, “old” computers and have no plans to buy new computers when my old ones become unusable.

Possibly it’s the large size and potentially aggressive personality of most cranes that prevents Matthiessen from considering one possible way to preserve the species. Cranes have fewer survival instincts than chickens and turkeys, and nobody complains when humans “rescue” or “rehabilitate” the occasional successful feral chicken or turkey. Matthiessen reports in tones of disgust that, when whooping cranes reared by humans (who had disguised themselves as defective whooping cranes) were released into the wild, the reversal of domestication scientists had hoped to achieve was thwarted by campers feeding the cranes table scraps. Exactly how bad is that? If humans refuse to limit our populations to the point where we can afford to stay out of the cranes’ territory, and if cranes have a natural tendency to become pets, and if humans have a natural tendency to protect our pets from their own stupidity, might domestication offer the best chance of survival for the cranes? Are cranes who lose their fear of humans as dangerous as the not really gentle deer? Horses and cattle can be dangerous, and people have worked out ways to reduce the danger of living with them. Could the owners of cranes' nesting sites enclose the birds' space and keep cranes alive as a sort of non-cuddly pets?

This book may leave me with more questions than answers but it's a well written, informative, entertaining read.