Review: Fall of the Birds
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 11 21, 2011
Each spring the robins arrived by Caitlan's birthday, but this year there wasn't a robin in sight.  The bird feeder hung full, but with no bird visitors pecking away at the sunflower seeds.  Caitlan was almost seventeen, but she was an avid birder, along with her stepfather and her late mother, who had died a little over six months ago.  Caitlan loved birds so much that she had finches of her own that she kept, and she was meticulous about their care, keeping some of them in a beautiful Victorian bird cage that her grandfather had given her.The stepfather was a claims adjustor for an insurance company and this day he was called out to a situation at a nursery where circumstances were "weird" according to his boss.  When he arrived, he saw that what had happened was nowhere near normal, that there were dead red-winged blackbirds everywhere on the ground, and even crashed through the roof of the nursery's greenhouse.  It was as if they had stopped in mid-air, died and had fallen to the ground. The adjustor happened to think that on his trip to the nursery, he hadn't seen a single bird at all.  He remembered that there had been several cases  of flocks of birds dying like this in Texas, and there were several theories why that happened, but none was ever settled on as a cause.This Kindle Single by Bradford Morrow is a lovely piece of writing that centers not only around birds, but around love, death and hope. Caitlan and her stepfather take an extended trip where they see even more flocks of birds that have died, but things look up for Caitlan as her birthday approaches and as she and her stepfather become closer in a father-daughter relationship. They begin to rise out of the depths of their mourning and some beautiful signs of hope begin to appear.As the narrator, who is the stepfather, travels back and forth to his claims inspections he listens to audiobooks, and the one we are privileged to hear about is Thomas Hardy's "The Woodlanders". This adds to the nature theme and to the knowledge of birds that this family loves so much, and he expands on Hardy's writing skills a bit.I really loved "Fall of the Birds".  Bradford Morrow is obviously a birder himself and knows what he's talking about with the information in this single.  Birding books are mentioned and although I do feed the birds and watch them, it made me think about watching them closer as well as those around me because life is fragile and fleeting and we should enjoy every minute while we can.