THE SNOW GEESE — A STORY OF HOME, by William Fiennes, Random House, 253 pages, $24.95.
Each spring, some 6 million snow geese begin a 3,000-mile flight from their winter quarters in Texas to the Canadian Arctic Circle. This book examines the grueling three-month journey.
"We tend towards home. Migrant birds don't travel for the sake of it. They move between winter and breeding grounds because the earth's axis is not perpendicular to the plane of its orbit around the sun. They migrate in response to the tilt, to the seasons and seasonally variable food supplies that exist on account of the tilt," Fiennes explains.
After enduring a fairly long illness, the author — a resident of Oxford, England — came across a book on snow geese and became fascinated with their annual journey. After recovering from his illness, he followed the birds along their route. What follows is as much a tale of people as it is of birds.
"I imagined a quest, a flight: a journey with the snow geese to the Arctic. The pang of nostalgia for home that I had experienced in the hospital, had now been supplanted by an equally intense longing for adventure, for strange horizons. I was as desperate to get away from home as I had been to return to it."
The author uses a Greyhound bus for some of his transportation, and from tales of sitting by a former nun obsessed with doing laundry to a bus driver finding an unclaimed wig, Fiennes' writing touches on Americana and nostalgia, too. He switches from the birds and theories of their homing instincts to stories of the people he meets during his trek. I found one tale of a derailed train lost under the Arctic permafrost to be especially intriguing.
If his research is correct, science doesn't know that much about the processes migratory birds use to know when to travel and how to find their way. And, the author discovered, your car can get rather messy if you get too close to a flock of snow geese.
The summer Arctic is a perfect place for the birds because there are few predators there, the sun shines 24 hours a day, and many nesting areas are available.
However, the book never really took off for me, and I've got to wonder if a member of the Audubon Society might not find this book much more interesting. Still, as I plodded through it, it did instill an increased awareness of birds in me. Since the Great Salt Lake is a seasonal home to many migratory birds, the Wasatch Front is probably one of those key places where it really is worth wondering what birds are flying overhead and why.
The book's biggest void may be that it contains no photographs. It doesn't need spectacular pictures of the birds flying in unison — just a few photos of some of the key areas along the author's journey. A single map, showing the birds' flight path from Eagle Lake, Texas, to the Fox Peninsula in Canada, is all it contains.
E-MAIL: lynn@desnews.com