A 2023 Firecracker Award Finalist
An Apple November 2022 Best Book of the Month
“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.”

lgli/Conversations with Birds.pdf

lgrsnf/Conversations with Birds.pdf

Adobe InDesign 17.3 (Macintosh)

Kumar, Priyanka

United States, United States of America

La Vergne, 2022

Mobilism

producers:
Adobe PDF Library 16.0.7

Preface 12
MANGO-COLORED BIRD 16
A ZEN MONK AT WORK 26
THE RASA OF BULBULS 44
A FLICKER OF LIGHT 66
THE FRUIT ORCHARD 82
LE PETIT NUTHATCH 94
INTERLUDE: WESTERN TANAGER 105
THE BOBCAT IN MY ROSE BED 110
THE MYSTERY DIMENSION 121
MESSENGERS FROM THE PAST 131
DAMSELS FLOATING IN AIR 140
CREPUSCULAR ACTIVITIES 152
PRAIRIE DOG TOWN 170
CERRO PEDERNAL 184
LA JORNADA DEL MUERTO 200
LIFTING THE VEIL 214
DESERT BREEDING GROUNDS 226
MI CASITA 242
THE MOUNTAIN LION OF BIRDS 254
CLIFF TOP 272
SOURCES 286
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 290

2023-11-03