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Margaret Atwood takes flight in the Guardian

In Margaret Atwood’s recent dystopian novel, The Year of the Flood, there is a litany of the saints worshiped by the eco-cult known as God’s Gardeners. One of these is Saint Bridget Stutchbury of the Shade Coffee. Readers familiar with Stutchbury’s 2007 book Silence of the Songbirds, about the various ways in which modern societies are imperiling the lives of avian species around the world (in part by buying sun-grown coffee, as opposed to the more bird-friendly shade-grown alternative) might get a titter out of this reference, but it is far from an anomaly for Atwood, who is a noted bird-lover.

Over the weekend, Atwood published a long piece in the Guardian about her longtime affection for all things avian – an article that references everything from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” to Hitchcock’s 1963 film The Birds. The article provides ample evidence of Atwood’s erudition, but is also a personal reckoning with her own relationship to birds:

I’ve always lived in the birdy world. I grew up in it – my parents were early conservationists and naturalists – and I can tell you from personal experience that small children have a limited tolerance for sitting still in canoes for hours on end being gnawed by mosquitoes, to see if the Very Rare Blur will deign to do a flit-by, when they won’t see it anyway because they were making the more controllable ant crawl up their arms. But early training does sometimes bear fruit, and I reconnected with the bird world once everyone, including me, realised that I was nearsighted. I needed special help with the twirly thing on the top of the binoculars, at which point the Very Rare Blur resolved into something I could actually see.

After examining the way writers and poets have historically used birds in their work, Atwood veers into Stutchbury territory, ending with an impassioned cri de coeur about the tenuous existence of many bird species in our world:

For instance, in the south Chile seas, the accidental capture of seabirds has been reduced from 1,500 a year to zero, with a close to zero rate having been achieved in Argentina. Despite these gains, 100,000 albatrosses are still being killed in fisheries every year, and 18 albatross species are facing extinction. But there’s a glimmer of hope: the task force [established by BirdLife in 2005] has shown that with a lot of will and with ridiculously small amounts of money, the death trend can be turned around. But it’s a matter of time, and extinction is forever. Human beings, it seems, are like little children, who never do quite believe that “all gone” means there isn’t any more, at all, ever.

UPDATE: An unedited version of this post containing the incorrect title of Atwood’s latest novel was accidentally posted. Quillblog regrets the error.