Priyanka Kumar - 2020 August

READ REVIEW BY PRIYANKA KUMAR OF TWO bookS BY NATIVE WOMEN, PUBLISHED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES (SEPT 16, 2020)

​​Priyanka Kumar received a copy of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac as a birthday gift in July 2003, and she continues to cherish it to this day. She was intrigued by how Leopold chased grouse on a snowy day or the way he listened to geese honk. Priyanka responded to Leopold’s childlike curiosity—the kind that we would do well to aspire to in our oversaturated, overextended, and tragically disconnected world. 

Much like Leopold in A Sand County Almanac, Priyanka keeps a diary about the wildlife that passes through her neighborhood. On a summer day she might see mango-colored tanagers flying from tree to tree or thrashers stopping by to probe the membrane of the soil. Acutely aware of how birdwatchers tend to have a laser focus on life lists, Priyanka wants to examine the perils of what she refers to as “eye-candy-birding” and explore how to achieve Leopold’s “land ethic” in a time when almost 50% of the world’s bird species are in decline, because of climate change, urban sprawl, and pesticide-laden farming.  

During recent research trips to northern New Mexico, Priyanka took part in the annual Abiquiú Bald Eagle Count and went on a patrol boat operated by the Army Corps of Engineers to explore the coves of Abiquiú Lake. Volunteers found only three eagles, a historic low, down from a high of 15 in 2015. This led her to ask two crucial questions:  Is this an anomaly or are populations truly in decline, and have warmer winters caused distribution shifts?   

A prolific writer, Priyanka Kumar has authored over a hundred essays and reviews on subjects including the high desert and bird migration. Her first book, Take Wing and Fly Here, explores how our “acquisitive tendencies have redefined our relationship with the outdoors.”

In Priyanka's Conversations With Birds (2022 Milkweed Editions ), she returns to her first encounters with outstanding and fragile birds in the Southwest, and considers the decline of important bird species in the high desert and how such declines impact what Leopold called our “land-community.”
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PAPERBACK EDITION OF A BOOK BY 
PRIYANKA KUMAR
to be released on September 12 2023 by Milkweed Editions

​A 2023 Firecracker Award Finalist
An Apple “November 2022 Best Books of the Month”

Tracing her movements across the American West, this stirring collection of essays brings the avian world richly to life .... [F]or Kumar, birds “become a portal to a more vivid, enchanted world.”
At a time when climate change, habitat loss, and the reckless use of pesticides are causing widespread extinction of species, Kumar’s reflections on these messengers from our distant past and harbingers of our future offer luminous evidence of her suggestion that “seeds of transformation lie dormant in all of our hearts. Sometimes it just takes the right bird to awaken us.”