Wild Anecdotes and Curious Asides

A review by Lori Potter

 Birdmania: A Remarkable Passion for Birds, by Bernd Brunner, translated by Jane Billinghurst

Greystone Books, 2017

292 pages, hardcover

ABA Sales / Buteo Books 14791

The book jacket of Birdmania advises that its contents are “quirky.” Soon enough, we learn that this disclosure is not misleading. The book’s quirkiness can be charming, or it can be maddening, or perhaps it takes turns being one or the other. To be sure, Birdmania is never dull.

Dipping into Birdmania is like poking around in your grandmother’s attic. There are treasures, there are surprises, and there are eye-rollers. Like your grandma’s attic, Birdmania is what a hipster would call “not well-curated.”  Instead, this is a book constructed around wild anecdotes and curious asides. For example, Chapter 3 concerns Richard Meinertzhagen (1878-1967), the British soldier and collector of bird skins. We learn that he “was born early enough to know Charles Darwin personally,” and that he “even sat on Darwin’s knee.” He fought alongside Lawrence of Arabia, and notoriously pilfered bird skins from a museum to pass them off as his own. Without missing a beat, Brunner goes on to inform us that Meinertzhagen was also the “proud possessor of a comprehensive collection of 600,000 bird lice.” 

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