Duck and cover

JONATHAN Trouern-Trend was a sergeant with the Connecticut National Guard when he was sent to Iraq in February 2004. Posted to Camp Anaconda, 40 miles north of Baghdad, Trouern-Trend felt himself lucky. For here in the heart of the Sunni Triangle there was water, and where there is water there are often birds.

Armed with a field guide and binoculars, Trouern-Trend, a lifelong bird-watcher went to work, and soon U.S. birding circles were abuzz with news from his blog, birdingbabylon.blogspot.com -- detailed sightings of grebes, kites, eagles, avocets, stilts, terns (the list grew to 122 species), each entry suffused with the delightful innocence of his enterprise. Reading an edited selection of his blogs is not quite the same as reading them in real time, but “Birding Babylon” is nonetheless a reminder of how fresh and startling these entries were when initially posted.

At times, his zeal is unnerving. His convoy gets a flat on the way out of Kuwait and draws some unwanted attention: “I’m lying on the ground with my eye on some guy racing around in a pickup truck, wondering if he’s going to take a potshot at us ... while a pair of crested larks were not even 10 feet from me, the male displaying and dancing around.” In May, he spies a hoopoe: “They are incredibly cool birds.” F-16s rip across a runway and the wood pigeons are unfazed. Outside Mosul, a Houbara bustard rises from the desert scrub. On New Years Day, 2005, “in full battle rattle, weapon included,” he spends 10 minutes “watching a trio of pied kingfishers hunting. One caught a fat six-inch fish and beat it against a no-swimming sign ... trying to get it to stop struggling.”

Such simple observations remind us that human affairs are transitory, those of birds timeless. Back home, Trouern-Trend is working on a wiki called “iraqfauna,” hoping to shift our attention from the roadside bombs and the insurgency to one of the world’s least reported wildlife habitats, in the valley of the Tigris and the Euphrates.