Culture January 1, 1

Yeats’s swans. The owl of Athena. Keats’s nightingale. The hoopoe of King Solomon. Dickinson’s bobolink. The birds of gods and poets inhabit The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature, offering a way into the question Jonathan Rosen, a devoted birder in increasingly damaged habitats, wants to answer. It’s the one posed by Frost’s ovenbird: “What to make of a diminished thing?”