Wild things

IN the mid-1990s, Jonathan Rosen took a bird-watching trip to New York’s Jamaica Bay. Across the water, ibises and egrets and snow geese flew against the Manhattan skyline, their silhouettes flickering past the World Trade Center. This was a “poetic juxtaposition of the permanent towers and the evanescent birds,” he reflected, a pirouettish thought that changed a few years later into the chill irony of prophecy reversed.

The birds are still here, and in all manner of variety. Rosen walks out regularly through Central Park from his nearby apartment to watch them. In cities, he notes, they are “the only remaining wild animals in abundance that carry on in spite of human development.” They are what we have of nature.

That is only the start of “The Life of the Skies,” a book of exuberant range, of insight and far sight, of trapezes swung for and caught, and now and then a trapeze too far. There are a great many birds in it, avidly watched, but to think of it as about bird-watching is to think of prayer as about steeples.

Rosen’s is a restless mind with a lyrical and exploring bent. An essayist, novelist and former culture editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, he works on the principle that if you reach a long way and often, your grasp score will be pretty good. His reaches and grasps make connections of all kinds, most especially between the rival poles of science and religion.

These were seriously and playfully displayed in “The Talmud and the Internet,” where Rosen argued that a particular kind of thinking -- in webs -- is common to both Jewish theology and digital computing. In his new book, still touching at length on science and faith, he strives to connect -- or find a middle ground between -- the human need to master nature and to be mastered by it. We are torn between the desire to be free to build, cut down, expand and develop “and the desire to live among free things that can survive only if we are less free.”

Our technological encroachments threaten birds in so many places -- the rain forests, the wetlands -- yet to be human we need them to stand for what remains free of us. In contrast to our incessant articulation, birds simply are. (“What a grand shivaree / of nightingales singing / not one voice / belongs to me,” wrote the Spanish poet Jorge Guillen.) They are both Rosen’s subject and the glass through which a wider subject is seen. He writes about birds of all kinds; he quotes poets, Darwinists and anti-Darwinists on birds; he goes to Israel to watch them.

Rosen also makes two trips to the South to accompany ornithologists seeking the possibly extinct ivory-billed woodpecker, which the marsh dwellers sometimes call the “Lord God bird” -- brilliantly scarlet, black and white, 20 inches long. They fail to spot it, but he puts the search in the context of a more universal need. His father has been stricken with dementia; the quest is a protest against the dying light -- the world’s as well. “I did not want the bird to be erased from biological consciousness,” he writes, “and extinction is a form of zoological memory loss.”

Following Rosen’s darting connections -- occasionally they can seem like disconnections -- is something of a bird watch itself. A flash of brilliant color, a disappearing hop, a reappearance two bushes away. He is a writer of intuitive flights, a counter-dogmatist and, with his mystical faith in nature, particularly counter to the environmental purists. The draining of Huleh Lake in Israel was a serious injury to the wildlife, yet the reclaimed land, an Israeli naturalist tells him, was essential to the imperiled young state in the 1950s. DDT is a scourge, but so too is malaria. Henry David Thoreau evoked a purity of solitude and self-reliance in the woods, yet he would sometimes go home to have supper with his mother.

Furthermore, Rosen writes, Thoreau’s scorn for the materialist striving of farmers and tradesmen was a paradox. They were closer than he was to his revered birds, which, like them, spend their time fetching food, building nests and -- the avian equivalent of lawsuits over fences -- flapping and squawking to defend them.

We too are part of nature, he insists, and his “we” encompasses the full range of human needs and aspirations: health, security, comfort, pleasure. It is a balance he seeks, while, quite winningly, he can make balance feel like civil war.

An old carol has God placing Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden “to dress and keep it well.” For Rosen, to dress and keep our planet well means dressing and keeping ourselves well. And also, and perhaps more passionately and vividly, the other way around. *