Your Armchair Birder is back from Asheville, North Carolina, and a book signing at Malaprops Bookstore & Café, the laid-back hangout where native Ashevillians chill with their lattes and lit. I talked about my book to a dozen or 15 enthusiasts, one of whom threw me a bit off stride by asking why I hadn’t been on the birdwalk that morning just a little way out of town on the Blue Ridge Parkway. “We saw 11 kinds of warblers,” she told me, and proceeded to start listing: Kentucky, hooded, blackburnian, yellow-throated, American redstart, black-throated blue, cerulean (yes! cerulean)–I mean, it went on and on.

I had to tell her, “Whoa, whoa. Who wants to be on a fragrant mountainside looking at 11 kinds of warblers when they can be in the line of cattle being prodded from room to room in the Biltmore House?”

But Dede and I loved Asheville–and Malaprops. May the independent bookstore not merely endure, but prevail.

Back home, the chickadees that took over the bluebird house are beginning to feed their just-hatched young, and the phoebes that have returned, once again, to the beam under the eave of the front porch must be very close to the end of incubation. (Last year–and it couldn’t have been more than a day or two before fledging–a big milksnake gobbled up the babies. This year I hope to be more vigilant, though I don’t know how.)

Then, yesterday evening, I heard the distinctive chick-burr, chick-burr, and looked just off the porch to see, on the limb of a pine tree surprisingly close to the ground, that most spectacular sign of summertime in my own lovely woods–the gorgeous scarlet tanager.

So to heck with 11 kinds of warblers.

Dede just passed along to me an item she ran across in the New York Times. (That’s her homepage; mine is the lowbrow AT&T/Yahoo, where this morning’s headline was “Drew Barrymore’s double fashion fiasco.”) Anyway, it seems that the Con Ed guys in Queens and Brooklyn have a tricky problem: how to protect their power equipment from monk parakeet nests on their utility poles.

By blocking ventilation and trapping heat, the huge nests are particularly destructive to an expensive piece of equipment called a “feeder reclosure.” One operator complained of having had to replace the $20,000 device five times in two years. Solution: the birds can be scared off by a battery-powered owl that hoots and swivels its head. Complication: the parakeets are quick to return when the batteries run out.

You know, if you step back and take a little perspective, you see that this whole man-versus-animal problem has a relatively short history (a couple of centuries) but a limitless future. In reading about the parakeets, I was reminded of the story from a few months ago–about the U.S Airways jet that swallowed some Canada geese and ended up in the Hudson River. Good thing everybody survived the emergency landing, or geese far and wide might have been cooked in retaliation.

It’s true that, down here in Georgia anyway, there are more Canada geese than there used to be. When they start taking down our airplanes, lots of folks are going to say there are too many. Well, not this armchair birder. He can generally be counted on to take the pre-industrial view in these matters. No, there are not too many Canada geese, or too many monk parakeets either.

What we’ve got is too many people, trying to get too many places, too fast. According to reports from the National Institute for Urban Wildlife and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 50 to 100 million birds are killed by automobiles every year. How many do you suppose have ever been killed by people on horses, or on bicycles, or on foot?

(Next time: off the soapbox and back to the armchair. Meanwhile, the “Armchair Birder 2009 World Tour” stops this weekend in Asheville, NC, for a Sunday, 3:00, signing at Malaprops Bookstore. Looking forward to checking out the lucky birds that inhabit the Biltmore House.)

Hello, all good bird people:

John Yow here, author of The Armchair Birder: Discovering the Secret Lives of Familiar Birds (University of North Carolina Press, Spring 2009).

I see from roaming the blogosphere that I’m not the only armchair birder out there, but the term may mean different things to different people. For me it means not only watching the birds from my armchair (or office chair, actually), but also reading about them–reading about them, especially (but not exclusively), in the vintage works of people like Arthur Cleveland Bent, Edward Howe Forbush, and John James Audubon (where you will find, for example, Audubon’s hilarious account of being chased into the river by a wounded, and very angry, sandhill crane.)

It doesn’t mean that I don’t “go birding.” Actually, I’ve been birding once or twice. But it does mean that I’m not likely to get in my ratty, broke-down truck here in Acworth, Georgia, and drive to Choke Canyon State Park in South Texas to witness the first-ever appearance in the U.S. of the pine flycatcher. Some folks did. Steve Matherly drove down from Houston, three and a half hours away, and admitted, “The dollars [spent to get here] per gram of bird is kind of amazing.” Wes Biggs flew in from Orlando, and Dotty Robbins made the trip from Gainesville, Florida. “He’s not spectacular,” said Dotty, “but the sighting is unique.”

Now those people are birders–no armchair needed, thank you very much. And more power to them.

But I have to say: there’s a whole lot going on right here outside my window. Every day another question I don’t know the answer to. Like, why have the pine siskins descended upon me this year in flocks of up to 50 birds, when I’ve never had more than a handful before? Why have the bluebirds let the chickadees take over their box? And where the dickens have my redbellied woodpeckers gone to?

That’s the idea behind the book: OK, I know who you are, but what are you doing? And why are you doing it? That will also be the idea behind this blog. I hope you’ll talk to me.

(And if you want to buy the book, that’s okay, too.)