Stories for Birders and Other Observers

Birders are among the keenest observers and five of the eleven short stories in this collection are inspired by imagination while birding or connecting with nature. Ida Pilcher is inexplicably followed wherever she goes by a dozen turkey vultures; Garland Duckett sees God in the golden eye of a Great Blue Heron; Nelson Mayfield, driven by an Internet report, searches frantically for life on Mars before his anticipated early demise; Nathanael Early’s dioramas of Civil War battlefields have taken over his basement; he barely has space for Vicksburg; Brian Feeney observes his neighbor, an Iraq war veteran, refurbishing a corroded four-foot bronze cross on his deck but why. Andrea Vojtko believes that even so-called normal people are eccentric in their own way, if you observe them long enough. In I Stop for Falcons, Thomas scoffs at a group of birders who hold up traffic while they scope out a falcon, labeling them weird. But his dialogue is itself eccentric. A woman searching for her mother’s lost year in Beverly Hills encounters her mother’s strange acquaintances and gets more than she bargained for. Five of these stories were published previously in literary journals with one, Jubilant Voices, nominated for a 2003 Pushcart prize. Andrea Vojtko lives in Arlington, Virginia.