Conversations with Birds - by Priyanka Kumar (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"How grateful I am for the chance to join this generous author's lyrical, intimate, and revelatory conversations with birds!" --Sy Montgomery, author of The Soul of an Octopus

"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."

Review Quotes

Praise for Conversations with Birds

"In this collection of elegant and evocative essays, a novelist reflects on the beauty and significance of birds, those animals that 'become a portal to a more vivid, enchanted world.'"-- New York Times

"A bird the color of mangoes, a beachcomber with a crescent-moon bill, the owl who controls the dark side of nature: in unforgettable encounters with feathered neighbors like these, Priyanka Kumar charts the life-changing surprise and splendor that birds can bring. They open the heart. They widen the soul. For Kumar, a peripatetic filmmaker and often a stranger in a strange land, birds have revealed connection and created wholeness. How grateful I am for the chance to join this generous author's lyrical, intimate, and revelatory conversations with birds!" --Sy Montgomery, author of The Soul of an Octopus

"In 20 vignettes and essays, Priyanka Kumar lovingly narrates how encounters with birds have molded her outlook on life, family, and nature, bridging the mountains of her childhood in India to her adult wanderings in California and New Mexico. A spark was Kumar's chance 'mango-colored bird' sighting--a Western Tanager--that stirs her to 'aliveness' during a near-death experience; her powerful musings take off from there. Her writing is full of beauty but also tells of destruction of the interconnected ecosystems that sustain birds and people. 'Sometimes it just takes the right bird to awaken us, ' she writes."--Audubon

"In her moving collection of elegant essays, Conversations with Birds, she recounts her close encounters with cranes and curlews, owls and tanagers, generously sharing their wisdom and her own."-- Michelle Nijhuis, author of Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction

"Priyanka Kumar's graceful and unusual work reminds us, again, of everything we lose with each insult to the natural world. Conversations with Birds is a wonderful read!"--Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever

"Kumar's illustrative writing style has the power to bring readers along on the journey through arroyos and Georgia O'Keefe's mountains. The dwindling number of eagles wintering in the wetlands of New Mexico evokes a certain sadness. Kumar emboldens readers to act upon concern for all sentient beings amid widespread ecological demise."--Maileen Hamto, San Francisco Book Review

"For anyone feeling lost in our increasingly complicated human world, Conversations With Birds is just the compass you need."--Apple, "Best Books of the Month"

"Priyanka Kumar's outstanding and profoundly moving book Conversations with Birds ... could help people around the world rewild their hearts and souls.... [A] landmark, most timely book."--Marc Beckoff, author of The Emotional Lives of Animals

"Kumar wows in this sparkling exploration of her relationship with the birds that serve as her 'almanac' and help her tune 'in to the seasons' and to herself. [. . .] These outstanding reflections will inspire and enlighten, and are perfect for readers of Diane Ackerman."--Publishers Weekly, starred review

"An eloquent depiction of how birding engenders a deep love of our ecosystems and a more profound understanding of ourselves."--Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Just as immersion in nature inspires a mix of profound awe and renewed curiosity about this Earth we call home, so, too, does filmmaker and novelist Priyanka Kumar's mesmerizing essay collection, Conversations With Birds --rendered in finely wrought prose, steeped in memory and thrumming with endless curiosity."--BookPage, starred review

"In the luminous essays of Priyanka Kumar's Conversations with Birds, birds are a portal to reclaiming childhood connections with nature and the lush, wild landscape of northern India's remote mountains."-- Foreword Reviews

"Kumar reflects on climate change, habit destruction, beauty, and the importance of staying open to wonder."--Book Riot

"Conversations With Birds consists of Kumar's observations, insights, and engagement with birds and the earth in prose that feels like a gentle guide for the reader to nurture their own relationship with nature, whatever it may look like...Kumar's writing is one of many reminders of what we have to lose, and what we must save."--Sarah Neilson, Shondaland

"Priyanka Kumar is attuned to the animating power that links her--and you and me--to our fellow creatures. While she has a deep affinity for birds, especially cranes and eagles and owls, she communes as well with bobcat, coyote, fox and their four-legged kin. It is a joy to travel with this versatile artist, often in the company of her husband and their two young daughters, as she roams the American Southwest in search of elusive and majestic wildlife."--Scott R. Sanders, author of The Way of Imagination

About the Author

Priyanka Kumar is the author of Conversations with Birds. Her essays and criticism appear in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Huffington Post, and High Country News. She is a recipient of the Aldo & Estella Leopold Writing Residency, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Award, a New Mexico/New Visions Governor's Award, a Canada Council for the Arts Grant, an Ontario Arts Council Literary Award, and an Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Fellowship. A graduate of the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts and an alumna of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Kumar wrote, directed and produced the feature documentary The Song of the Little Road, starring Martin Scorsese and Ravi Shankar. Kumar has taught at the University of California Santa Cruz and the University of Southern California, and serves on the Board of Directors at the Leopold Writing Program.