Consider the Birds, by Debbie Blue

Like Lauren Winner, who admits in the foreword to Consider the Birds that she is “not really interested in birds at all,” I’m not especially enamored of feathered creatures. It’s not that I revile them, but I have perhaps been shat upon once too many times. I am, however, a fan of Debbie Blue, one of the founding pastors of House of Mercy in St. Paul, Minnesota. Blue’s first two books, Sensual Orthodoxy (homiletics) and From Stone to Living Word (hermeneutics), are on my short list of books I consider life changing. Which is to say I’ll read whatever the good Reverend Blue wishes to write about. Vultures and sparrows and quail? So be it.

Consider the Birds is, as the subtitle promises, a provocative guide to birds of the Bible. And it is excellent: observant, exhaustive and often extremely funny. One passage begins with an exaltation of the beauty of birds. “You couldn’t make up the peacock,” Blue gushes. “If you were going to create a wonderland, of course you would put bright colors that fly into the sky. They are like abstract paintings that sing. And lay eggs.” In her next breath she presents a bird of a different feather:

New World vultures projectile-vomit into the face of anything that startles them. They eat excrement (especially human) and dead bodies. They defecate over their own legs. Most vultures are bald. This allows them to stick their entire heads inside a carcass without feathers to foul with blood and rotting flesh. A turkey vulture has very large and obvious nostrils. It is possible to see through from one side of its head to the other. This is not pretty. It’s weird and scary.