Bird News: Vagrants and Visitors on a Peculiar Island

""Most birds undertake perilous migrations with no guides, maps, or experience--it is a wonder that any survive,"" opines Laux, an ornithologist. A bird's life, as he describes it, is a nearly constant frenetic round of athletic activity. After heavy rains, innumerable young birds--not yet fully feathered--get soaked and freeze, or else starve. Laux writes with rare passion, knowledge and insight about birds, finely tuned biological marvels honed by millennia of evolving and surviving. Attractively designed and complemented by b&w photographs and sketches, this unusual book melds Laux's crisp essays with his ""Bird News"" columns for the Martha's Vineyard Gazette into an informal year-round log of birdwatching on Martha's Vineyard, the popular Massachusetts tourist spot and birders' island paradise. Roseate terns, snow buntings, short-eared owls, little blue herons, yodeling common loons, turkey vultures, orchard orioles and a multitude of other species--some local, others migrant--wing their way through Laux's daybook. In democratic, grassroots fashion, the text incorporates the sightings of a network of fellow bird enthusiasts spread out over the Vineyard's shores, tidal flats, towns and forest. What saves this ornithological diary from becoming a cluttered, repetitious catalogue or recital of colorful and exotic bird sightings is Laux's uncanny empathy with our feathered friends and his lyrically precise observations of the island changing through the seasons. He makes birdwatching a continual adventure, a way of relating to nature and the planet. (Sept.)