New Book Review: The Secret Language of Birds

Title: The Secret Language of Birds 

Author: Lynne Kelly

Date: 2024 (scheduled to hit the stores today!)

Publisher: Delacorte

ISBN: 978-1-5247-7027-3

Length: 240 pages (shows as 100 in PDF format)

Quote: "The mockingbird glanced up at me, hopped a few steps down the sidewalk, then turned back, like it wanted me to follow."

Yes, this is an Advance Reader Copy that had been lost in the pile in my Kindle, but randomly popped onto the top of the stack in time for me to get a review posted on the exact day the book is scheduled to reach your favorite store. What put it on the top of the stack (while I was trying to read another book that's been on my TBR list all winter) may have been the effect of Microsoft Not Playing Well With Others, but in this case it was a happy accident. 

The Secret Language of Birds is a wholesome, realistic story--not the kind of "science fiction" that speculates about the possible consequences of some scientific theory or development, but fiction that describes what's going on in real science today. Computers can't understand, but can digitize the sound, of the language of birds and a deaf child who's familiar with the ways computers digitize sound can help scientists who are studying endangered birds. The story is not told from the point of view of that child, but from a schoolmate who wants to be her friend.

Nina, who is just noticeably older than the "campers" (up to age ten) and too young to be even a junior "counselor," is invited to spend the summer with an aunt who runs a summer camp. Nina is a shy extrovert, prematurely sensitized to other people's feelings by having several older siblings. Her suburban yuppie parents aren't sure that Aunt Audrey's "weird" taste for nature over money is the influence they want Nina to have, but the house does feel awfully crowded in between school terms, so they let her go. Confidence bolstered by feeling able to "fit in" with cabin mates, Nina thinks about the girl in her neighborhood whom she wanted to claim as a friend at school but who transferred to another school instead. It wasn't Nina's fault, though Nina embarrassed herself while Iris was going to her school. Iris just likes the school with the deaf program better.

In the great summer camp tradition, the girls hear a story, fact-based in their fictive world, of an isolated cabin that was used as an infirmary, in the early twentieth century, for campers who went down with contagious diseases after arriving at camp. Such children couldn't be sent home and had to be kept in quarantine at camp. At their camp one of them was Josephine, who died of tuberculosis in the infirmary after writing home that she was enjoying the "company" of the wildlife around the isolated cabin. The girls sneak out--counselors hiding in the woods to make sure they're safe, but they think they're sneaking--to visit the old infirmary at night and see whether it's haunted. They see something white, as tall as they are! It screams! Nina knows it's not a ghost and starts making regular visits to the site, with binoculars, to find out what sort of bird it is. It's a whooping crane. Actually, there are two cranes. 

So the characters get the latest updated version of an experience exploring nature: When children can't be trained not to want to play outdoors, they can be allowed to spend a few weeks in strictly supervised groups, never a chance for solitary meditation. If, through an accidental oversight for which the adult responsible apologizes, they're able to see wildlife, they have to run back indoors and look up online all the rules and protocols for reporting it to the right government officials who will make sure they watch the wildlife only through binoculars...which does happen to be the best way to approach whooping cranes. 

It's instructive to compare this dreary story with other books about children and wildlife--even recent ones like Jean George's or some of Cynthia Voigt's. How my generation have, by simple overpopulation, shrunk the world for the young. No wonder young people no longer feel that they're even choosing "one child or none" because that's the right choice; that they're not able to mate and reproduce.

Nina wants to name a baby whooping crane after herself, but the egg onto which she projects her own identity isn't viable. That detail seems more significant than it may have been meant to be. After all, while an introvert child could be expected, given the cast of characters in this story, to want to name the crane after Iris (who exchanges e-mails with Nina and helps identify the whooping cranes) or possibly after Miss Odetta (the official government scientist who talks with the children about the cranes), an extrovert child would be likely to name anything after perself. The author could have used that detail simply by writing a fictionalized version of something that really happened. Still it seems like a metaphor for Generation Z, the children of the new millennium, which may yet see the collapse of our civilization. 

What makes whooping cranes too stupid to live without special help may be a metaphor for the way extroverts like Nina think. They lack an inner core of their own identity. We think of chickens as stupid birds but if a chicken is reared by humans, although it will be friendly and familiar with humans, it will still know how to mate with another chicken and rear baby chicks. A whooping crane will not. If baby whooping cranes observe other birds or animals while they're young, they'll want to be any other lifeform except whooping cranes when they grow up, will "identify as" the other species; they're likely to refuse to mate with other whooping cranes. They will not, in any case, know how to rear baby whooping cranes. They need to take their cues from other whooping cranes to survive...and that's likely not to be enough.

Fortunately for the species, humans have learned to back away from the few living whooping cranes who were reared by their own kind and are able to rear their own kind. At the same time that people who want to help the species avoid letting the cranes see what they really look like, they can bring food or water if necessary, or replace a non-viable egg with a viable one.

Nina accepts that her severely limited opportunity to watch birds is a best case situation for her. Will young readers accept this? Should they? Should adults giving this book to today's middle grade students introduce it with something like "This is the way those unfortunate children who have to live in town really have to live. We should feel sorry for them and be kind to them"? 

However regrettable the reality Lynne Kelly observed may be, her observations are keen and her story is well told. Perhaps in a few years readers can look forward to happier stories about a teenaged or grown-up Nina...working or volunteering in a nature park, studying ornithology at university, moving to the country and rearing children whose encounters with wildlife may be less constricted. Meanwhile, for those who live in whooping crane habitat (they migrate up the middle of North America between Texas and Louisiana and central Canada, and they're also a featured attraction at the Patuxent nature park in Maryland), this book is a delightful re-encounter with the big dimwits. For those who have never paid much attention to whooping cranes, this book will at least give a good sense of why so many people care about them. 

Another part of the reality Kelly observes well is the degree to which people like Nina's family have been recruited into unthinkingly advertising corporate brands. Nina's bird consciousness started when her big noisy family drove away and left her "alone," not at a truck stop, but at a Buc-ee's. (Buc-ee's is a Texas-based chain of Texas-sized truck stops, designed to make the big truck hubs of the twentieth century, like the one long-distance travellers know as Wytheville in Virginia, look small.) Peach cobbler is not topped with ice cream, or vanilla ice cream, but vanilla Blue Bell. And so on. Some readers may be turned off by product placements in a novel, so they rate a content warning. I tolerate a few placements of products that aren't positively harmful; in this book I think they're realistically used to build an atmosphere that suits the story and characters.