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One lovely spring day when Virginia left for elementary school, the overgrown farm with the big white farmhouse (with pillars!) and the old white oak trees (maybe 300 years old or more) lining the dirt road by their new house was there. By the time she got home from school, it wasn’t. She was eight years old. Popping off the bus at the end of the school day, the little pod of kids she was part of stood on the new sidewalk in stunned silence as yellow monsters moved back and forth across the horizon, the once fertile soil blowing up into the sky like a nuclear bomb; the grand old oak trees piled up like garbage. Later that winter, hiking through the apple orchard, ice skates dangling over her shoulders, she would reach her beloved pond only to find it bulldozed out of existence–a sign for a new hotel on top of it (the frogs she’d try to catch each summer–flattened).
It was at age eight she became an “environmentalist”, before the word even existed. This was before there were “environmental laws” and “Environmental Impact Statements”. Virginia saw this world before America developed some understanding of what it was doing to itself, and has spent her career implementing many of these regulations–regulations that were the result of exactly the scene she observed when she was eight years old.
Reviewed by Rich Follett for Readers' Favorite
Birdbrain by Virginia Arthur is a sweeping semi-autobiographical chronicle (the author states in the foreword that many of the book’s events actually happened) of the life of a birder biologist/conservationist whose journey takes her to some of America’s most biologically diverse and unspoiled places. Protagonist Ellowyn Fischer’s odyssey from a failed marriage to lifetime tenure as an esteemed professor emeritus (spanning nearly sixty years) is recounted in an expansive narrative with vistas as wide and awe-inspiring as the panoramas in which they take place: the Mohave Desert; the sage scrub chaparral of Southern California; the Medicine Bow Mountains of Wyoming; Montana’s legendary Big Sky, and a host of other wilderness treasures all figure prominently.
Ellowyn - Ellie - who discovers her first group of ‘birdbrains’ by accident when she shows up on the wrong date for what she thinks will be a church picnic, finds a lifelong passion for all of nature’s denizens and connects with the land on a spiritual level the likes of which most of us can only imagine. Through her passion for birds and other living things, Ellie explores, advocates for, and sometimes succeeds in conserving vital fragments of a vanishing wilderness. Her indomitable spirit conjures awareness and action from everyone she meets and her legacy contains a powerful message: the act of destruction is infinitely easier than the act of creation and we who inhabit the Earth must tread gently if we are to continue the life full of abundance we too often take for granted.
Virginia Arthur writes with a warm, wry humor that easily propels the reader through nearly 600 pages of Ellie’s experiences. Included in the mix are education, romance, supernatural encounters, villains, and heroes and no small amount of wisdom. Birdbrain truly has something to inspire everyone - it is a gritty but tenderhearted paean to the idea that one person with enough conviction and determination can truly make a difference and change our world for the better.
