April 1, 2026, will go down in my calendar as one of my favorite April Fool’s Day. Not because after years of playing mild-but-devious pranks on friends and family (and then eventually avoiding communicating with those same family and friends altogether on this day), someone “got me” early this morning with an April Fool’s joke. No, today someone else “got me,” which is to say they totally got the message of my new book, The Bird with the Flaming Red Feet.
The “gotcha” took the form of a book review in the newsletter of the South Sound Bird Alliance (formerly the Black Hills Audubon Society). The newsletter arrived by e-mail and I clicked the link to “The Armchair Birder” column as I usually do before diving into the rest of the birdy news. I started reading and felt like someone had been reading my mind and heart for the past several years.
The reviewer did not attempt to summarize the book, excerpt passages, or get into the particulars of the Pigeon Guillemot’s life history or the community science project focused on this Pacific seabird. The reviewer took a 30,000-foot view of what it means to spend time among the birds in the 21st century and wove in Roger Tory Peterson’s essay “What Are you Really?” (on how birders identify themselves) and Shunryu Suzuki’s classic Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.
I wasn’t familiar with Peterson’s essay and hadn’t read Suzuki’s book since college but the short excerpts from these two works in the review of my book aptly addresses my struggle to figure out what kind of a birder I am given that I don’t keep a life list or know much about any birds other than the Pigeon Guillemot and the Marbled Murrelet (the subject of my book, Rare Bird). It was only after a decade studying the Pigeon Guillemots on the same beach near my home in Olympia, Washington, that I began to think of myself as a birder—a “slow birder” or even a “one-bird birder” (absurd as that may seem).
And it was only after reading the “Armchair Birding” book review this morning that I realized how deeply satisfying and novel it is to let one bird guide you into its life and shape how you think about its unique life.
Video of Pigeon Guillemots on Puget Sound, Washington. Courtesy Hillary Smith.