Word: birding
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...Bird Artist by Howard Norman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Here's a marvelously operatic novel, roiling with outrageous men and women and with jealousy, revenge, gunfire, deadly sea swells and lust in a lighthouse, all set in the tiny Newfoundland community of Witless Bay (one store, one restaurant, a sawmill and a drydock) just after the turn of the century. The author writes well against this florid grain, producing extravagant melodrama in language that is strict, laconic and evocative...
...Lord Rothschild wanted three mountain ranges explored, so I was sent out at 23 to collect the bird fauna," Mayr says. "I sent back over 3000 bird skins...
...have been a bird-watcher since I was this big," Mayr says, motioning to the height of a young boy. "I was brought up in a good German family, and every Sunday, we went into nature. My mother knew every mushroom in the forest, and my father knew the flowers and the birds...
...then moved to the American Museum of Natural History in New York as a bird specialist, where he worked for two years to attain the permanent position of assistant curator...
Mayr says one of his responsibilities was organizing Lord Rothschild's collection of 280,000 bird skins, which he calls "the best collection ever...