The Enchantment of Birds: Memories from a Birder's Life.

Sandy Campbell is a reference librarian in the Science and Technology Library at the University of Alberta.

Richard Cannings and his brothers grew up in the Okanagan Valley, enthralled with nature. Eventually all became biologists; Richard, a professor at UBC, has spent his life enjoying nature, but especially birds.

Each of the book’s 30 chapters holds much factual information about a particular bird found in British Columbia and throughout North America. These include chickadees, crows, and bohemian waxwings as well as the more geographically specific pygmy nuthatch and tufted puffin (tufted puffins can dive as much as 60 feet under the surface of the ocean).

Cannings’s accounts are his personal impressions and understanding of the species. He often begins with a boyhood encounter. For example, he recounts rescuing two baby kingbirds that had fallen out of the nest and feeding the one that survived by stuffing mashed bugs and hard-boiled egg down its throat with a toothpick. That bird survived to fly away.

For any birdwatcher, these accounts offer special insights into a fellow birder’s world—a little like watching birds through another birder’s eyes. The vicarious experience is delightful. Canning is personable and informal in his writing. While he tells us at one point that as a youth he learned all the Latin names for the birds in the park in which he worked, he doesn’t use them here. The book is a comfortable read.