Conversations with Birds
eBook - ePub

Conversations with Birds

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Conversations with Birds

About this book

"Birds are my almanac. They tune me into the seasons, and into myself."

So begins this lively collection of essays by acclaimed filmmaker and novelist Priyanka Kumar. Growing up at the feet of the Himalayas in northern India, Kumar took for granted her immersion in a lush natural world. After moving to North America as a teenager, she found herself increasingly distanced from more than human life and discouraged by the civilization she saw contributing to its destruction. It was only in her twenties, living in Los Angeles and working on films, that she began to rediscover her place in the landscape—and in the cosmos—by way of watching birds.

Tracing her movements across the American West, this stirring collection of essays brings the avian world richly to life. Kumar's perspective is not that of a list keeper, counting and cataloguing species. Rather, from the mango-colored western tanager that rescues her from a bout of altitude sickness in Sequoia National Park to ancient sandhill cranes in the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, and from the snowy plovers building shallow nests with bits of shell and grass to the white-breasted nuthatch that regularly visits the apricot tree behind her family's casita in Santa Fe, for Kumar, birds "become a portal to a more vivid, enchanted world."

At a time when climate change, habitat loss, and the reckless use of pesticides are causing widespread extinction of species, Kumar's reflections on these messengers from our distant past and harbingers of our future offer luminous evidence of her suggestion that "seeds of transformation lie dormant in all of our hearts. Sometimes it just takes the right bird to awaken us."

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Yes, you can access Conversations with Birds by Priyanka Kumar in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Biological Sciences & Zoology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. Preface
  7. 1. Mango-Colored Bird
  8. 2. A Zen Monk at Work
  9. 3. The Rasa of Bulbuls
  10. 4. A Flicker of Light
  11. 5. The Fruit Orchard
  12. 6. Le Petit Nuthatch
  13. 7. Interlude: Western Tanager
  14. 8. The Bobcat in My Rose Bed
  15. 9. The Mystery Dimension
  16. 10. Messengers from the Past
  17. 11. Damsels Floating in Air
  18. 12. Crepuscular Activities
  19. 13. Prairie Dog Town
  20. 14. Cerro Pedernal
  21. 15. La Jornada del Muerto
  22. 16. Lifting the Veil
  23. 17. Desert Breeding Grounds
  24. 18. Mi Casita
  25. 19. The Mountain Lion of Birds
  26. 20. Cliff Top
  27. Sources
  28. Acknowledgments
  29. About the Author