Return to Warden's Grove: Science, Desire, and the Lives of Sparrows (Sightline Books) [Hardcover]

Christopher Norment (Author)

Book Description

Series: Sightline Books | Publication Date: March 15, 2007

Based on three seasons of field research in the Canadian Arctic, Christopher Norment’s exquisitely crafted meditation on science and nature, wildness and civilization, is marked by bottomless prose, reflection on timeless questions, and keen observations of the world and our place in it. In an era increasingly marked by cutting-edge research at the cellular and molecular level, what is the role for scientists of sympathetic observation? What can patient waiting tell us about ourselves and our place in the world?

His family at home in the American Midwest, Norment spends months on end living in isolation in the Northwest Territories, studying the ecology of the Harris’s Sparrow. Although the fourteenth-century German mystic Meister Eckhardt wrote, “God is at home, we are in the far country,” Norment argues that an intellectual, emotional, and spiritual “far country” can be found in the lives of animals and arctic wilderness. For Norment, “doing science” can lead to an enriched aesthetic and emotional connection to something beyond the self and a way to develop a sacred sense of place in a world that feels increasingly less welcoming, certain, and familiar. 

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

For three summers, field biologist Norment (In the North of Our Lives) lived in a stand of spruce called Warden's Grove in the Canadian Northwest Territories, studying the breeding habits of a songbird known as Harris's sparrow. In this affecting book, he meditates on the desire for wilderness and solitude that drew him to such a remote place, and he tells what it's like to be alone for hours in a silent, forbidding environment observing an animal in its natural habitat. For him, scientific research can contribute as much to an emotional, subjective relationship with the natural world as do art, literature, music, and poetry; even taxonomy, often considered nothing more than the prosaic science of naming and classifying living things, has poetry. The official Latin name for Harris's sparrow, for example, means the banded thrush with the whistle-like song, which beautifully evokes the essence of this little bird. As he reports on what he learned from his patient observation and reflects on the months he spent attempting to understand the birds' minds as well as his own, Norment eloquently affirms the beauty of biological fieldwork as a vital way to pay attention to the world and be connected with something outside the self. (Mar.)
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From Booklist

Norment recounts his three seasons studying the Harris’s Sparrow in a remote section of Canada’s Northwest Territory in a way that is appealing both for its ornithological insight and extraordinarily personal revelations. Given his often solitary sojourns in nature, opportunities for comparisons to Thoreau abound, but Norment not only observes and describes the sparrows; he also ruminates on the scientific naming of things, which he compares to a map connecting all living creatures. He witnesses the mournful death of a musk ox and performs a postmortem to satisfy his need to understand what has gone wrong in the wild. His own contribution to the unnatural death of wildlife is a source of inner conflict. He wonders if museum specimens might represent nothing more than “our species’ passion for collecting things” and can only accept the need to collect and study while also lamenting the loss of so many living things. Norment is a man of conscience, and his book will speak to all who have a passion for wild things. --Colleen Mondor

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 234 pages
• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press; 1 edition (March 15, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1587296330
• ISBN-13: 978-1587296338
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,383,583 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A scientist's journey into the wilderness, September 6, 2008

By 

Lynn Harnett (Marathon, FL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Return to Warden's Grove: Science, Desire, and the Lives of Sparrows (Sightline Books) (Hardcover)

In 1988, at age 37, with an 18-month-old daughter and a precarious financial outlook, biologist Norment decides to chuck his steady, if unsatisfying teaching job, and pursue his doctorate. He chooses to study Harris's Sparrows, for two good reasons. For one, they breed in a beautiful, isolated patch of the Canadian arctic that Norment remembers with longing from a youthful 3-year stint there. And the second good reason is that because the place is so remote, very little is known about them.

His book describes the three summers that he spent in Warden's Grove - from the initial uncertainties, failures and fears of failure to his increasing confidence in himself and affection for his subject. The structure of his book echoes this path, moving from the general and objective to the specific and subjective.

The beginning is concerned with setting up the project - repairing the bear-trashed cabin, finding the sparrow's nests, trapping and banding birds, recording the data. Not until the end of the book do we learn of the nightmares he had about horrible accidents befalling his tiny daughter, or how deeply aware he was of the effect his youthful experiences in Warden's Grove had had on his psyche, as if coming back could make him young and carefree again.

We learn little about his research assistants (there was a different one each year), but at the end of the book he admits he kept them - even the two who were close friends - at arm's length, never discussing anything personal.

As he settles more comfortably into the project, he describes the satisfaction he gets from the work, his pleasure in maps and the beauty of scientific names, the hours of watching undone by the superior patience and attention of a small bird, the plagues of mosquitoes and black flies and the differing personalities of the clouds of delicate, crafty mosquitoes and the hordes of frenzied, voracious black flies.

We share his relief when one of the female sparrows escapes a shrike attack and his ambivalence about "collecting" - killing birds (outside his project area of course) for science.

Norment gives us a feel for the work and the attention to detail, but he gives us an even stronger feel for the scientist, his place in the scheme of things, his relation with the wilderness. The writing is contemplative, vivid and sometimes dryly humorous, mostly when dealing with bugs: "Mosquitoes hovered at the screen door, persistent in their obsessive interest, their collective hum an ironically gentle susurrus."

This is a book for anyone interested in the natural world and especially in one man's journey as he gropes his way through life with determination, doubt and eloquent reflection.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a close observer of the natural world, October 31, 2008

By 

reader (farmington, ct USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Return to Warden's Grove: Science, Desire, and the Lives of Sparrows (Sightline Books) (Hardcover)

Norment, an avian biologist, studied the breeding biology of Harris' Sparrow in the Northwest Territories of Canada for several seasons. He lived in a small cabin at the edge of the Thelon River, northeast of Great Slave Lake.
The author closely observed the bird and animal life in a harsh,remote but beautiful landscape. His is a sensitive, emotional portrait of the natural world, beautifully written. This is one of the best nature memoirs I have ever read.

5.0 out of 5 stars tones and ecotones, March 5, 2010

By 

Vinnedge M. Lawrence "vlawrence5" (West Baldwin, ME United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Return to Warden's Grove: Science, Desire, and the Lives of Sparrows (Sightline Books) (Hardcover)

Norment writes of a life in torment, of living on edges contemplating ecotones common to most but likely perceived by far too few. The book details Norment's Ph.D. research over three summers on the breeding biology of Harris's sparrow around Warden's Grove near the Thelon River in Canada's Northwest Territories, but is essentially a candid introspection. With its meticulous placement of commas, the book is as nearly a grammar as an exorcism of the demons that haunt field biologists. I observed very few typos and only a single intrusion of the popular non-word "hopefully." While I may have learned more of his psyche than is comforting, I longed for Norment to be more forthcoming of his knowledge of the history of the male "who was something more than an 'average' Harris's sparrow" and whose vector intersected Norment's at North Grove "on a beautifully warm day in early June" of his first field season. Norment begins and ends his self-searching chapter, "Killing Things," lamenting his shooting of this bird among the "eighteen (or was it twenty?) individuals of a species that I deeply respected, knew intimately, and loved." Having killed nearly four thousand dragonflies and damselflies during my own Ph.D. field research, I perceive the keen edge of Norment's tone. More than most, field biologists are drawn to those "other nations," to "the far country" whence we strive to view the world and ourselves through the eyes of other species. Via "Return to Warden's Grove," I believe we gain a vantage in this endeavor.