Bird Songs of the Mesozoic

A Day Hiker’s Guide to the Nearby Wild

As Balzac famously said of cities, "To walk is to vegetate, to stroll is to live." For David Brendan Hopes, day hikes, the occasional overnight in the mountains, or a ramble through a city park provide the perfect opportunity for both refuge and speculation. Like most hikers, Hopes delights in encounters with wild animals, rare plants, or simply the perfect moment of weather and view. As a kind of flaneur of the nearby wild, Hopes considers these encounters as part of the larger, ongoing "show" of life, human and natural.

For Hopes, hiking trails and art and literature are all corridors between worlds. A quiet day among the ferns of early spring or the unchanging face of a mountain transports him back through time, to wonder whether dinosaurs might have had song ("warbling carnosaurs," "bell-bird duckbills"). The emergence of cicadas makes him think of certain men and women who are "gorgeous in impractical ways." A glorious late-fall display of roses (in his backyard, not on the trail), suggests that plants might have moods. He touches on hunting, deep ecology, and Wicca, mixes in references to sci-fi novels (Lost on Venus by M. E. Patchett) and William Blake’s The Four Zoas, and marks days on the annual and liturgical calendar.

Hopes’s aims are neither totally random nor simply acquisitive. His hikes and thoughts are part of a sifting of experience--a seeking of experience--that unites the everyday with a larger, ongoing, personal and eternal story.

Praise for Birdsongs of the Mesozoic

"Poet, professor, and author Hopes turns his gaze toward the landscape of Asheville, North Carolina, and points farther afield. Knowledgeable, gifted with curiosity and a superb talent, the author writes ’about the portion of nature I see around me, the dragonflies that buzz into my studio, the opossum cornered in the garage, the cats asleep on the desk.’ Hopes knows how to find the magical in the quotidian: he sings to listless rhinoceroses at the Mississippi zoo and catches the fringes of hurricane Ivan in the middle of a bank parking lot. On another day, a routine hike leads to the exhilaration of running behind a catamount up a dark mountain. Throughout, he provides history and sublime detail (thoughts about a resident groundhog outside the author’s studio lead to musings on the solstice, national identity, and the grief of mammals). One can open any page and find a gem: ’Rolling thunder before dawn; the moon behind the bunched clouds is trembling.’ This collection of wondrous and near—perfect essays should bring Hopes a wider audience."—Booklist"Starred Review"

"A naturalist with the heart and prose of a poet, Hopes writes essays whose meanderings mimic the mind on a walk, noticing, remembering, wondering, and sometimes stopping in its tracks. . . . Blending in just the right amount of wit, fact, and personal and cultural reflection, Bird Songs of the Mesozoic is full of surprises."—Body + Soul

"Hopes, who writes fiction and poetry and also paints, acts, sings, and teaches, quickly reveals himself to be an astute observer of a very intricate and personal wilderness. . . . The part of nature we all see, without venturing to the Galapagos, or even much further afield than our back door. It’s the microcosm of hornets, mantises, rose bushes and sudden storms that most of us take so much for granted they’re rendered invisible."—Mountain Xpress —Alli Marshall

"Hopes is a poet. His sentences are beautifully cadenced, his images and examples blaze like William Blake’s ’Tiger, Tiger,’ and he keeps things cool with pop lingo."—Asheville Citizen Times