Birding under fire

E: The Environmental Magazine, Sept-Oct, 2006 by Paul Gleason

"One day I hope to return, with binoculars but without a weapon," writes Sergeant Jonathan Trouern-Trend, a life-long birdwatcher and member of the Connecticut National Guard. Birding Babylon (Sierra Club Books, $9.95) collects highlights from Trouern-Trend's birding blog of the same name, in which he focuses a naturalist's eye on the deserts of Iraq. Each entry contains not only a list of the birds he sees on his various tours around the troubled country, but also his brief reflections on the region's history and people.

The best portions of the book compare Trouern-Trend's observations of birds with the physical or psychological landscapes around them: "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 (which would have been suicidal), while a pair of crested larks were not even 10 feet from me, the male displaying and dancing around." It's these unlikely and often opaque connections between wildlife and a war zone that make the book an interesting read, even if you don't recognize a single one of the Babylonian birds.