When I was a boy, I lived near the entrance to Hades. Lago d’Averno north of Naples near Cumae was where Virgil located an entrance to the kingdom of the dead. I listened hard for the baying of the three-headed dog Cerberus, but never heard him. The round lake—it’s a flooded crater—turned dark red in summer from some kind of algae, which was pretty cool stuff for a nine-year-old.
The Latin avernus means birdless, from the Greek aornos (a– without, and ornos, hey ornithology, meaning birds), because birds flying over the lake were supposed to drop dead from the toxic fumes spewing forth from the volcanically active underworld. (The area is geologically hot and bouncy.) As Edward Way Teale notes in this anthology*, this proved to a friend of his that “hell is a place with no birds.”
American Birds is a place with a lot of birds. Audubon considers the old saw about swallows burying themselves in mud during the winter months. Thoreau really appreciates his spy glass—he was one of the first optically enhanced bird-watchers. Sarah Orne Jewett’s “A White Heron” (1886) is a beautiful story about the awakening of environmental consciousness, which still took some time to bear fruit, for Teale in 1956 writes how rare the Snowy Egret still is. Burroughs notes the disappearing Bald Eagles, long before DDT nearly eradicated them, as it did the East Coast’s subspecies of Peregrine Falcon.
(Facilis descensus Averno, wrote Virgil—easy is the descent to hell; not so easy is the emergence from the dead.)
This Library of America “Literary Companion” came out a few years ago but I’ve just gotten around to it. Glad I have, for Robinson Jeffers’ “enskyment,” Barry Lopez’s raven holding a crow’s eye, and much else.
Co-editor Andrew Rubenfeld may be known to this blog’s local readers as a former head of the Linnaean Society of New York (which doesn’t waste a single vowel, whereas the Linnean Society of London has streamlined.) A name or two in the acknowledgments may be familiar, too.
“But why should people wonder that I watch birds? It’s like being surprised that someone has sex or goes to the bathroom.” — Jonathan Rosen
*Anth, flowers: an anthology is a collection of flowers.