Book Review: Space for Birds

Reviewed by Toni Woodruff

An interstellar love letter to two birds with long legs, long necks, and their own lives to lead

The Lesser Flamingo lives in large pink groups in low water up the length of Africa. When seen from space, they’re like large pink dotted clouds. While it might seem like a serene quiet from up above—a whoosh of wings soaring—the sound must be deafening. A party of honks, growls, flapping, and splashing. 

Whooping Cranes, meanwhile, live in monogamous relationships, varying in length, and sometimes move with only their partner or in small packs. Nothing near the raucous flamingos, but they’ve got a voice too. Just listen for their unison call The cranes are white dots stamping through marsh, spearing blue crabs and fighting to survive. This endangered bird needs our help and more people like Dr. Roberta L. Bondar.

You’ll notice first the poetic nature of Bondar’s prose. It’s not every day that our birder coffee table books come with such beauty on the sentence level. But beyond the prose, she’s also seen what so few have seen—from Space to Earth, the journey that these birds go on topographically—because she was the world’s first neurologist in space aboard the shuttle Discovery.

Space for Birds is a snapshot journey along with Bondar as she zooms out from our great blue marble among the stars in to the tall, long-legged birds making their way up and down the earth. 

The photographs are a combination of Earth from various vantages in Space and the two birds being discussed. In a book about the importance of conservation, it’s a pleasure that all photographs are taken in the only way that wouldn’t affect the birds or the earth around it: from the air.

There are so many photographs of Earth from Space in this book, and this changes its function as a coffee table book a little bit. It’s not so much about the beauty of singular photographs to flip through (even if obviously impressive from a practical standpoint) but more so on relaying information like flight patterns, the physical effects of climate change, and what the earth looks like zoomed out. The book will be best enjoyed by reading it in its entirety, but many pages provide quality reading and unique photographs on their own as well.

If we want our flying dinosaur best friends to stay on our planet, we’ll need to make and leave space for birds. Looking at them from above is a powerful reminder of protecting our living Earth.

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