Quote of the Day (Isak Dinesen, on Flamingoes)

“The flamingoes are the most delicately colored of all the African birds, pink and red like a flying twig of an oleander bush. They have incredibly long legs and bizarre and recherche curves of their necks and bodies, as if from some exquisite traditional prudery they were making all attitudes and movements in life as difficult as possible.” —Danish novelist Karen Blixen, a.k.a. Isak Dinesen (1885-1962), Out of Africa (1937)

The image accompanying this post, of flamingoes in West Coast National Park, South Africa, was taken on Jan. 1, 2000, by flowcomm.

Quote of the Day (Ogden Nash, on ‘The Whimper of the Sea-Gull’)

"Hark to the whimper of the sea-gull;
He weeps because he's not an ea-gull.
Suppose you were, you silly sea-gull,
Could you explain it to your she-gull?”—American poet Ogden Nash (1902-1971), “The Sea-Gull,” in On Wings of Song: Poems About Birds, edited by J. D. McClatchy (2000)

Quote of the Day (Dwight Macdonald, on Illogical Thinking in Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’)

“Tippi [Hedren] warns a teacher that crows are massing outside the schoolhouse; their jointly worked-out response to the threat is not to put the kids into the cellar but to march them outside to walk home. To no one’s surprise but Hitchcock’s, the birds come shrieking like Stukas onto the helpless little column.” —American cultural critic and editor Dwight Macdonald (1906-1982), on Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, in “Films: Mostly on Bird-Watching,” Esquire, October 1963

Sixty years ago this week, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds premiered in New York City. The above quote is only a sample of Dwight MacDonald’s ironic takedown of this film from the “Master of Suspense.”

A post of mine from nine years ago discussed how Hitchcock radically transformed Daphne DuMaurier’s dark, short tale of isolation and terror in a British cottage into something quite different. But I thought that Macdonald’s quote was not only worthwhile in itself to read, but pointed to the sharp critical divide that quickly developed around the film.

At the time, detractors assailed the film for a variety of reasons: a weak script, awkward acting, sadism, special effects at the expense of logic or motivation. 

Movie fans paid no heed to the naysaying reviewers, making this a financially successful follow-up to Hitchcock’s Psycho from three years before.

Even so, the film continues to split opinion, only this time Hitchcock critics call the director out for using live birds for the avian attic attack on Tippi Hedren—an experience that understandably traumatized the actress. (And that was before even  worse treatment she would suffer at his hands during the making of Marnie, when the director subjected her to sexual harassment.)

The Birds, then, is certainly controversial. Yet I hardly think I am alone in regarding it as mesmerizing and chilling, all the way down to its final, ambiguous—and deeply foreboding—image of a landscape filled with the birds, silent and watching.

Quote of the Day (Dwight MacDonald, Taking Issue With Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’)

“The only characters in the film who aren't birdbrains are the birds.”—American cultural critic and editor Dwight MacDonald (1906-1982), on Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, in “Films: Mostly on Bird-Watching,” Esquire, October 1963

Quote of the Day (Richard Brookhiser, on Sparrows As Great City Birds)

“Pigeons are the iconic city bird but sparrows come close behind. Like pigeons they live not in the curated patches of parks but on the sidewalks and streets. They are streetwalkers, pedestrians, non-stop maintenance men…Why they are so suited to an urban existence I cannot say. Size must help; they were early converts to the tiny-house movement. If you want to see their houses, follow their chirping. That is how I discovered, years ago, that they had colonized the cross-pieces of street lights. Once I started looking up I saw that every tubular hollow end had an insistent denizen. They also like the metal housings of retractable awnings; they live over the door of my favorite restaurant, just below the neon sign, watching the aspiring models come and go.”—Essayist and historian Richard Brookhiser, “City Desk: Bird’s-Eye View,” National Review, Jan. 23, 2017

(The accompanying photo of Richard Brookhiser was taken Dec. 9, 2011, when he was discussing his book James Madison in Charlottesville, Va., by the Miller Center, a non-partisan institute at the University of Virginia focused on the American Presidency.)

Quote of the Day (Annie Dillard, on the ‘February Squawks’ of Birds in the Valley)

“The birds have started singing in the valley. Their February squawks and naked chirps are fully fledged now, and long lyrics fly in the air. Birdsong catches in the mountains’ rim and pools in the valley; it threads through forests, it slides down creeks. At the house a wonderful thing happens. The mockingbird that nests each year in the front-yard spruce strikes up his chant in high places, and one of those high places is my chimney. When he sings there, the hollow chimney act as a soundbox, like the careful emptiness inside a cello or violin, and the notes of the song gather fullness and reverberate through the house. He sings a phrase and repeats it exactly; then he sings another and repeats that, then another. The mockingbird’s invention is limitless; he strews newness about as casually as a god. He is tireless, too; toward June he will begin his daily marathon at two in the morning and scarcely pause for breath until eleven at night. I don’t know when he sleeps.” —American essayist Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974)

Quote of the Day (Robert Benchley, on His Morning Torture by Pigeons)

“Although I live in the middle of a very large city, I am awakened every morning by a low gurgling sound which turns out to be the result of one, two, or three pigeons walking in at my window and sneering at me. Granted that I am a fit subject for sneering as I lie there, possibly with one shoe on or an unattractive expression on my face, but there is something more than just a passing criticism in these birds making remarks about me. They have some ugly scheme on foot against me, and I know it. Sooner or later it will come out, and then I can sue.”—American humorist and film actor Robert Benchley (1889-1945), “Down with Pigeons,” in The Best of Robert Benchley (1983)

Photo of the Day: From One Birdman to Another

Field Guide to the Birds (1934) led many naturalists to liken the achievement of its author, Roger Tory Peterson, to that of John James Audubon. That connection is underscored at the Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History in Jamestown, NY.

On exhibit there, where I snapped this photo on my vacation in early August, was this facsimile of a four-volume edition of Audubon’s Double Elephant Portfolio of his Birds of America. More than 400 North American species—every one known at the time, in the 1830s—were depicted here, rendered in their natural habitat by the artist.

This leather-bound volume of a 1981 limited-press run, owned by Peterson, was donated to the Institute in 1997, one year after his death.

Photo of the Day: Reading Room, Roger Tory Peterson Institute, Jamestown NY

Over this past weekend, in an early-afternoon break in the rain, I saw a large group of bird watchers along the Palisades in northern New Jersey. I’m sure that more than a few of them realize the huge debt they owe to Roger Tory Peterson. After all, back in 1934, the upstate New York native published Field Guide to the Birds, and over the next half century he expanded on this achievement with still more in-depth guides to birds and other wildlife. “In this century‚ no one has done more to promote an interest in living creatures than Roger Tory Peterson,” the environmental Paul Ehrlich has claimed.

The image accompanying this post is of the Main Reading Room at the Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History in Jamestown, N.Y. I took this photo while on vacation a month ago at the nearby Chautauqua Institution. 

The entire building was designed by the famous architectural firm Robert A.M. Stern, but, as a former librarian—and a continuing, inveterate library patron—I was especially drawn to this room. The combination of the light brown wood and the warm sunshine pouring through the windows gives the room the kind of inviting, natural feeling that Peterson would have valued.

Photo of the Day: Hangin’ Out by the Hudson

Just before the New Year (which seems more distant not just with each day but with each snowfall), while visiting Veterans Park in Nyack, NY, I snapped this image of birds congregating by the Hudson River.

Photo of the Day: Great Blue Heron, Sea Pines Forest Preserve, SC

The alligators that I wrote about in a prior post were the most exotic creatures I saw in Sea Pines Forest Preserve, Hilton Head Island SC last month. But there was also the magnificent great blue heron that I photographed on that same one-hour guided open-boat tour conducted by H20 Sports.

The long legs of these carnivorous birds make them great waders, and subjects for amateur photographers such as myself. But their wide wing span makes them a wonder to behold in flight.