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Best Book of 1891: The Birds of Manitoba
Sylvia Legris
'During the pandemic, birds (along with many insects and wild plants) have landed in my life and poems again.'
I discovered Ernest E. Thompson's The Birds of Manitoba four or five years ago in a secondhand bookstore in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where I live. Though I had picked up this book on several previous visits to this store, I resisted purchasing it. The Birds of Manitoba was first published in 1891 by the Smithsonian Institution and printed by Washington's 'government printing office.' I don't know how similar my copy, a second edition published in Winnipeg in 1975, is to the original; it has a cover with as much appeal as a manila file folder that's been dropped in a puddle and dried out, unadorned, mottled with age and, by its smell, cigarette smoke. Someone's felt-tipped handwriting in the corner now worn to an illegible smear. If this book were edible, it would have bad mouthfeel.
I grew up in Manitoba, the province next to Saskatchewan, and for many years my feelings about birds were more informed by watching Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds at an impressionable age than they were by an innate affinity with nature. At a distance, birds were fine, but too close and they made me nervous, fearful of unexpected swooping and eye-pecks.
The sole Amazon customer review of the Kindle Edition of The Birds of Manitoba (there are no reviews of the print editions) states: 'Expected normal bird book with pictures and write-ups. This is not that.' Thompson's book is definitely not a 'normal bird book' à la Roger Tory Peterson. It contains not a single image or illustration of a bird; there are no maps or diagrams showing species prevalence or migration paths. On first flip-through, this book is lacklustre, without colour and splash, with neither elegant design nor typography.
Beginning with my poetry collection Nerve Squall, through which menacing, anxiety-inducing crows and ravens caw and claw their way, birds have taken a startling flight path through my life and poems. Songbirds and birdsong are ubiquitous in Pneumatic Antiphonal. In my forthcoming collection, Garden Physic, birds make fleeting appearances in backyards and gardens. In the course of working on these collections, I have become increasingly fascinated by birds, at times obsessed with them.
I think it's impossible to be a birder, even a half-assed, sporadic birder like me, without accumulating an assortment of bird books and field guides. In truth, I've either owned or borrowed field guides not only about birds, but about many varieties of plants and grasses, about ferns, forests, mushrooms, mammals, fish, insects, reptiles & amphibians, minerals, coral, and weather. I even encountered a field guide to fields, only surpassed by a field guide to field guides!
Serendipity has always played a big part in the books I gravitate to. I often pick up books on instinct, sensing that there's something I need to know in a particular book, though it often takes me a long time to figure out what that is.
The Birds of Manitoba is a compilation of field notes of bird activity in Manitoba, Canada from approximately 1882 to 1887, during which time Thompson was largely based in Carberry, a town in southwest Manitoba, currently with a population of just over 1700. Thompson also includes relevant extracts of field observations by other ornithologists working in the same region during this period. The scope of these field notes is so specific and dated that you have to wonder if this book would hold much interest to anyone in 2020, that is, other than an ornithologically-oriented historian of this particular time and region or a poet largely guided by her odd instincts and nose for odd resources.
During the pandemic, birds (along with many insects and wild plants) have landed in my life and poems again. In the months leading up to the global outbreak of Covid-19, I started to make notes toward some new poems informed by the writings of Joseph Grinnell, a 19th-century field biologist and ornithologist who devised a system for organizing a naturalist's field journal. Grinnell, the first director of Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, thought that in order to create a base of knowledge that would be relevant to future naturalists and biologists, that it is essential to observe and document the flora and fauna in close proximity to where one resides. What drew me to Grinnell initially, though, was not what and where he was observing, but rather his precise method of documenting those observations while they were occurring. My plan a year ago was to write the poetry-equivalent of a naturalist's notebook, and it was in looking for other texts as possible examples of what form my poems might take that I dug out The Birds of Manitoba, unopened since the day I bought it.
Since March, I have travelled no further than just outside the city limits of Saskatoon. My primary social life during the pandemic consists of going for walks with my partner, often to nearby 'naturalized' sites and parks, as well as to conservation areas in or near the city. I have never been more aware of the variety of birds, insects, and plants right where I live than I have during these months of unprecedented stress.
Because Saskatchewan and Manitoba share the same prairie ecoregion, field guides sometimes lump the two provinces together. As such, Thompson's The Birds of Manitoba conveys not only a sense of the range of birdlife in Manitoba in the late 19th-century, but also in Saskatchewan during the same period.
I've always admired work in any discipline that seems in part driven by obsession: Agnes Martin's grid paintings, for example, or Robert Walser's microscripts. Although field guides as a rule are neither literary nor artistic, I find them pleasing both aesthetically and in terms of their specialty-specific language. Their meticulous focus on detail and organization satisfies my own obsessive tendencies. If I had to choose between being isolated on a desert island with either a stack of my favourite poets or a stack of field guides to the local flora and fauna, would I choose the books that would nurture my soul or the books that would tell me which plants are edible and which animals friendly?
During the comparative isolation of Covid-19, my thoughts have frequently floated back to Joseph Grinnell's '100-Mile Diet' approach to taxonomy. Although Covid-19 restricts how far I am able and willing to venture, such limitation has, unexpectedly, both opened up and focused my new poetry, poetry that brims with nearby sloughs and the birds and plants that populate them.
But where does The Birds of Manitoba fit in? It was in thinking about Grinnell that I started imagining Thompson, homesteading with his brother in a remote area of Manitoba, documenting bird movement in the prairie grasses just steps away. Though the entries in The Birds of Manitoba are often dry and technical, these pages are so infused with rich detail and observation they seem alive. The life of the observer, of the person fully engaged with the natural world, even if it's just the birds in their own backyard or in a nearby park, can be abundant—it is this that strikes me so powerfully when I open The Birds of Manitoba.
On a final note, it was only recently that I discovered that Ernest E. Thompson later changed his named to Ernest Thompson Seton, under which name he published numerous children's books about wild animals and nature.
Image © Sylvia Legris
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Sylvia Legris is a critically acclaimed Canadian poet. She is the recipient of the Griffin Prize for poetry, and has previously published one collection with New Directions, The Hideous Hidden (2016).
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