Conversations with Birds

In her collection of essays, "Birds Are My Almanac," acclaimed filmmaker and novelist Priyanka Kumar explores her connection with birds and their role in reconnecting her with nature. Growing up in India, she found herself distanced from human life in North America. However, through her observations of birds, she rediscover her place in the landscape and the cosmos. Kumar's essays showcase the vibrant avian world and offer insights into the potential for transformation and awakening within us.

Format: Hardback
Length: 34 pages
Publication date: 02 December 2022
Publisher: Milkweed Editions

"Birds are my almanac. They tune me into the seasons, and into myself."

So begins this lively collection of essays by acclaimed filmmaker and novelist Priyanka Kumar. Growing up at the feet of the Himalayas in northern India, Kumar took for granted her immersion in a lush natural world. After moving to North America as a teenager, she found herself increasingly distanced from more than human life and discouraged by the civilization she saw contributing to its destruction. It was only in her twenties, living in Los Angeles and working on films, that she began to rediscover her place in the landscape—and in the cosmos—by way of watching birds.

Tracing her movements across the American West, this stirring collection of essays brings the avian world richly to life. Kumar's perspective is not that of a list keeper, counting and cataloguing species. Rather, from the mango-colored western tanager that rescues her from a bout of altitude sickness in Sequoia National Park to ancient sandhill cranes in the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, and from the snowy plovers building shallow nests with bits of shell and grass to the white-breasted nuthatch that regularly visits the apricot tree behind her family's casita in Santa Fe, for Kumar, birds "become a portal to a more vivid, enchanted world."

At a time when climate change, habitat loss, and the reckless use of pesticides are causing widespread extinction of species, Kumar's reflections on these messengers from our distant past and harbingers of our future offer luminous evidence of her suggestion that "seeds of transformation lie dormant in all of our hearts. Sometimes it just takes the right bird to awaken us."

Dimension: 215 x 139 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781571313997