The Private Eye: Observing Snow Geese

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

Burns’s wispy, vague style acts like a dirty window between the reader
and her subject, snow geese. We know that the geese are included in the
book, somewhere beyond the wanderings, sidetracks, and philosophical
mutterings. The view is through a filter of splotchy, muddy prose that
is short on direction and devoid of life and organization. The author
describes her work as “a web of views all linked by snow geese.”
Presumably she sees a structure to her dithering and rambling.

Many of Burns’s observations are not of snow geese but of observers
of snow geese. Her journalism experience surfaces, with large chunks of
the book devoted to interviews with people who have actually observed
geese and to musings on what she thinks it might be like to observe
geese. She writes about various scientists, naturalists, farmers,
hunters, Native people, and artists who have observed snow geese. In the
manner of a school essay, she quotes from books about geese.

A scattering of dull, nondescript black-and-white photos blends in
perfectly with the texture of the work. For the grand finale, Burns
cooks a snow goose for Thanksgiving dinner.

What can we say? As an author of bird books, her goose is cooked.