Review of the book “The Flight Attendant” – Spectrum of Science
“You only love what you know and you protect only what you love.” Even if the authors of the work “Die Flugbegleiter” do not refer to this quote from Konrad Lorenz, they act accordingly. In 41 short and completely different texts, from notes and reports to environmental policy articles, journalists share their in-depth knowledge about birds and their enthusiasm with readers – and encourage them to effectively protect nature.
Classification and protection
At first glance, the individual contributions, divided into three chapters, seem like an arbitrary, dried-up subject. Although context is not always there, texts are always easy to read.
Chapter 1, “Watching and Wondering,” deals with “common birds” blackbirds, thrushes, and starlings. But even an intense observation of known things can always produce new insights, as the first article explains. So one suddenly realizes the chirping of birds or the coloring of the sky dome more accurately and sees them in a new, social or environmental context. “The good thing about bird watching is learning to wait,” and maybe even finding “ways out of the mess in your head”: observing nature as medicine.
Here are suggestions on how to memorize bird sounds, for example by dividing the birds into senior or minor singers or describing their song with words: The golden hammer then sings something like “How I loved you.” However, these memory aids work primarily for their inventors, while not always understandable to other observers.
In Birds’ Declaration of Love, you can learn a lot about their behavior and demonstrated educational abilities. In another post, the DJ’s passion for birdlife and nature conservation is reflected in his electronic music. For him, “nature is the key to happiness, it makes you independent of material things.”
How eager young people can be to bird watching can be seen at Hamburg’s “Little Birds Club”. The youth organization affiliated with NABU is a gentle refutation of the cliches of the ornithologist as “a gray-haired person with decades of observation experience”. Additionally, there is a suggestion for parents to take seriously early indications of their children’s enthusiasm towards nature and possibly enjoy watching them for themselves.
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