A Twofer Launch for the Guillies!

This month marked there return of the Pigeon Guillemots from their wintering grounds to the nearshore waters of the Salish Sea as they prepare for their breeding season. And with this welcome event, copies of The Bird with the Flaming Red Feet were released in flocks to bookstores and online retailers. You can order copies from Mountaineers Books/Skipstone Press or your favorite indie bookstore.

The April 15 book launch party in Olympia suggests that there is a healthy appetite for stories about seabirds, “one-bird birding,” birding for birds, community science, deep connections to place, “Flaming Red Wine,” “Wing Patch White,” and very small plates loaded with appetizers, desserts, and prey items (Swedish fish). Thank you to the ~200 people who filed their taxes (or extensions) to find their way to Olympia Ballroom to celebrate the Pigeon Guillemot and its people.

And with the launch of the book came the launch of the uncommonly catchy song written by my brother, Jonathan Mudd, a musician based in South Carolina. Jonathan spent a morning with me on the beach where I collect data on the Pigeon Guillemots during their summer breeding season. And then he read a draft of my manuscript of my book. He totally got it. Listen on Spotify or Apple Music. The song reflects so perfectly my experience of watching the guillemots over the past thirteen summers, of following my curiosity, of deeply connecting to place, and of feeling the spin of the earth as is it moves through the seasons on '“guillemot time.”

In this song, my brother plays guitars and sings vocals. Andy Luthringer is on bass, Jon Spurney plays piano and organ, Mark Williams is on solo guitar. And Eli Smith did the mixing. I’m calling it “alcid rock.” I think you will love it.

And then my brother outdid himself and made a music video combing this song with photos and videos of Pigeon Guillemots in the Pacific Northwest. The photos and videos were provided through the generosity of my fellow guillemot surveyors in Puget Sound, Washington and along Oregon’s central coast. You can watch the YouTube video here to sense the wild exuberance of this uncommonly common seabird.

Now…go forth and find your guillemot.

Slow Birding

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.

A Star for the Guillemots

This lovely review is from Booklist, which is a trade review magazine run by the American Library Association. Booklist reaches many librarians, booksellers, and other publishing industry professionals. A starred review denotes a work judged to be outstanding in its genre. NOTE: unlike movie, restaurant, and hotel reviews, one star is the maximum number of stars awarded by Booklist.

As the author of The Bird with Flaming Red Feet, it’s heartening for me to read a review by someone who really gets my book and goals of the community science project at the center of it. My story of the Pigeon Guillemot reflects at least two complete overhauls of my original concept and outline, which was deemed by my fabulous editors at Mountaineers Books/Skipstone to be a bit too “heady.” I took this as a compliment and also realized that some grounding was essential. I needed to bring readers onto the Puget Sound beach with me for our weekly surveys of the guillemots. This gave me the opportunity to describe field work, data collection, and all the good things that came from those one-hour surveys of our teams of “guillemoteers” as I like to call us. I poured many of those stories into the final version of my book. I was so pleased to read that the “…genuine fun, thrills, and joy…” of studying the Pigeon Guillemots was palpable by the Booklist reveiwer.

The Bird with the Flaming Red Feet will be winging its way onto bookshelves, online booksellers, and e-readers later this month. The official launch date is April 7th. Please visit my events page to find an event near you—mostly in Western Washington to start. Don’t expect the standard author book reading (i.e., introduction, reading of a few passages, Q&A, and book signing). I’m hoping to mix things up a bit and honor the spirit of the Pigeon Guillemot with some “genuine fun”