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Birdsplaining: A Natural History
In pursuit of moments of feeling 'sharply alive', confronting fear of the body's betrayals, and roaming across Wales, Scotland, California and the Middle East, Birdsplaining is focused unapologetically on the uniqueness of women's experience of nature and constraints placed upon it. Sometimes bristling, always ethical, it upends familiar ways of seeing the natural world.
A wren in the house foretells a death, while a tech-loving parrot aids a woman’s recovery. Crows’ misbehaviour suggests how the ‘natural’ order, ranked by men, may be challenged. A blur of bunting above an unassuming bog raises questions about how nature reserves were chosen. Should the oriole be named ‘green’ or golden? The flaws of field guides across decades prove that this is a feminist issue. A buzzard, scavenging a severed ewe’s leg, teaches taboos about curiosity.
Whose poo is the mammal scat uncovered in the attic, and should the swallows make their home inside yours? The nightjar’s churring brings on unease at racism and privilege dividing nature lovers, past and present. The skin of a Palestine sunbird provokes concern at the colonial origins of ornithology. And when a sparrowhawk makes a move on a murmuration, the starlings show how threat – in the shape of flood, climate change or illness – may be faced down.
Jasmine Donahaye is in pursuit of feeling ‘sharply alive’, understanding things on her own terms and undoing old lessons about how to behave. Here, she finally confronts fear: of violence and of the body's betrayals, daring at last, to ‘get things wrong’.
Roaming across Wales, Scotland, California and the Middle East, she is unapologetically focused on the uniqueness of women’s experience of nature and the constraints placed upon it. Sometimes bristling, always ethical, Birdsplaining upends familiar ways of seeing the natural world.
A wren in the house foretells a death, while a tech-loving parrot aids a woman’s recovery. Crows’ misbehaviour suggests how the ‘natural’ order, ranked by men, may be challenged. A blur of bunting above an unassuming bog raises questions about how nature reserves were chosen. Should the oriole be named ‘green’ or golden? The flaws of field guides across decades prove that this is a feminist issue. A buzzard, scavenging a severed ewe’s leg, teaches taboos about curiosity.
Whose poo is the mammal scat uncovered in the attic, and should the swallows make their home inside yours? The nightjar’s churring brings on unease at racism and privilege dividing nature lovers, past and present. The skin of a Palestine sunbird provokes concern at the colonial origins of ornithology. And when a sparrowhawk makes a move on a murmuration, the starlings show how threat – in the shape of flood, climate change or illness – may be faced down.
Jasmine Donahaye is in pursuit of feeling ‘sharply alive’, understanding things on her own terms and undoing old lessons about how to behave. Here, she finally confronts fear: of violence and of the body's betrayals, daring at last, to ‘get things wrong’.
Roaming across Wales, Scotland, California and the Middle East, she is unapologetically focused on the uniqueness of women’s experience of nature and the constraints placed upon it. Sometimes bristling, always ethical, Birdsplaining upends familiar ways of seeing the natural world.
208 pages, Paperback
First published January 26, 2023
5 people are currently reading
98 people want to read
About the author
Jasmine Donahaye
14 books6 followersJasmine Donahaye holds a BA in Celtic Studies from UC Berkeley, and a PhD in English from Swansea University. She worked for many years in the publishing sector and at the Welsh Books Council, and now lectures in Creative Writing at Swansea University. Her publications include poetry, cultural criticism, fiction and creative non-fiction. Her poetry collection, Misappropriations was shortlisted for the Jerwood Aldeburgh first collection prize, and Self-Portrait as Ruth was longlisted for Wales Book of the Year. Her monograph Whose People? Wales, Israel, Palestine was published in 2012 by the UWP.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
August 16, 2023
30 Books in 30 Days / Book #16
Fabulous!
4.5*
Fabulous!
4.5*
August 23, 2025
Rich and vibrant. Spoke to me in so many ways I needed.
February 14, 2023
What a marvellous read this was! I’m familiar with some of Donahaye’s work, and I liked her memoir Losing Israel and her poetry on motherhood in particular. When I pre-ordered Birdsplaining, I didn’t quite know what to expect. I knew it would be about birds because I know that she loves them, but I didn’t expect it to be about so much more than that. With the number of topics she tackles, one would expect the book to be a massive tome, yet it doesn’t feel, not for a single moment, that she leaves anything unsaid. There’s anger and fear, self-deprecation and sadness, euphoria and courage. The writing is beautiful, bold, vivid and, despite the intimate and sometimes painfully dark accounts, always pacey. A treat to delve into time and again (I already have passages marked that I want to re-read).
February 9, 2023
What a superb book this is. By turns moving, funny, illuminating and at all times thought-provoking. The ideas in each essay swoop and glide like the most elegant of birds, making connections and opening up new avenues of thought. The essays stand alone but read from start to finish, themes emerge: the loss of a sister, the ‘protected area of wilderness’ that is the human body, domestic violence, fear and safety, how space in the natural world is accessed and experienced by different communities, and above all what it means to be a woman in the natural world, and in the world of nature writing.
November 1, 2024
I loved this book which was a terrific combination of birding + social justice-related themes. Right up my alley! A review in quotes:
1. "I particularly mistrust an approach to the natural world and wilderness as something transformative and spectacular, when it can just as often be squalid and mundane. When I say I mistrust those approaches and ideas, it's because I know what's going on when I myself take any of those attitudes. And I do take them - I take all of them. What Hinch describes as the 'best' nature writing is the kind I trust least. It has about it an absolute knowledge that I find alienating. If the authors consult field guides to help with identification, they don't let on. They name what they observe with unhesitating certainty. "
2. "'A white, middle-class Englishman! A Lone Enraptured Male! From Cambridge! Here to boldly go, "discovering", then quelling our harsh and lovely and sometimes difficult land with his civilised lyrical words.' She is not as beguiled as Hinch by Macfarlane's writing, which she sees as a continuation of an early monastic search for 'remote' places for 'some spiritual quest'. That monastic spiritual quest began a literary tradition which, she proposes, has persisted ever since and remains largely uninterrogated: the association of literature, remoteness, wildness and spiritually uplifted men. What Hinch presents as the ideal of nature writing, Kathleen Jamie identifies as self-involved. 'There are empty places, hill and moor and island out there, where, if you're minded,' she observes acerbically, you can meet no one else for a while, see nothing "intrusive" and have all the challenging, solipsistic experiences you please.' But, she points out, there are other ways of seeing those places - ways that don't unpeople them, or strip them of the history that shaped them, and that don't pass over the small and very local wild in favour of something on a grand scale.
Yes, precisely, I think, with more than a touch of glee. I wonder, a little viciously, whether Mr Hinch has ever killed a wasp, whether he would recognise being bothered by a wasp as an encounter with a natural world both incomprehensible by, and often hostile to, human perception'. Perhaps that apprehension of the natural world only works on the grand, spiritual scale of escape from self and from unwelcome humanity. Perhaps it requires a spectacular landscape, while the local and familiar - and small, common species - do not count, because they do not deliver the same heady experience.
In the end of course I have to confront what is really irritating me: my argument with Jim Hinch is an argument with myself. Annoyingly, I recognise the shadow of my own attitudes in his. I, too, carry in me unexamined notions about the purity and autonomy of the natural world. I am shaped by the same cultural values into an exclamatory response to wilderness on a grand scale."
3. "All the worst clichés pertain for me, and demonstrate just how clichés operate: some notionally more 'real' or authentic experience than the shared experience in the Dyfi Osprey Observatory, or on the flat maintained paths on Skomer, or in an RSPB hide with a wheelchair ramp. But my private moment of encounter is not more authentic than a shared one. It is the result of many invisible privileges - that weighty, overburdened word - that not everyone has. The judgement that says, even if only secretly, that it is more real, or more authentic than, say, a child for the first time seeing an osprey from an observatory, is simply an expression of exclusivity and implicit hostility
- as is dictating the 'right' attitude to take to swifts, or the 'proper' approach to take in nature writing.
It's threatening to open up the boundaries of your group to include others who might not share your values or attitudes, because to do so might change the nature of your experience. It can be the case with any group, notional or real. I, for one, don't want to change. Sullenly I resist the idea that the value and authenticity of an experience that I care about is based on my enjoying certain privileges. They don't feel like privileges - but then privilege never does feel like privilege: experientially it is always relative, not absolute. There is always someone else you can point to who has more advantages than you, as though this somehow diminishes or even cancels out your own advantages."
1. "I particularly mistrust an approach to the natural world and wilderness as something transformative and spectacular, when it can just as often be squalid and mundane. When I say I mistrust those approaches and ideas, it's because I know what's going on when I myself take any of those attitudes. And I do take them - I take all of them. What Hinch describes as the 'best' nature writing is the kind I trust least. It has about it an absolute knowledge that I find alienating. If the authors consult field guides to help with identification, they don't let on. They name what they observe with unhesitating certainty. "
2. "'A white, middle-class Englishman! A Lone Enraptured Male! From Cambridge! Here to boldly go, "discovering", then quelling our harsh and lovely and sometimes difficult land with his civilised lyrical words.' She is not as beguiled as Hinch by Macfarlane's writing, which she sees as a continuation of an early monastic search for 'remote' places for 'some spiritual quest'. That monastic spiritual quest began a literary tradition which, she proposes, has persisted ever since and remains largely uninterrogated: the association of literature, remoteness, wildness and spiritually uplifted men. What Hinch presents as the ideal of nature writing, Kathleen Jamie identifies as self-involved. 'There are empty places, hill and moor and island out there, where, if you're minded,' she observes acerbically, you can meet no one else for a while, see nothing "intrusive" and have all the challenging, solipsistic experiences you please.' But, she points out, there are other ways of seeing those places - ways that don't unpeople them, or strip them of the history that shaped them, and that don't pass over the small and very local wild in favour of something on a grand scale.
Yes, precisely, I think, with more than a touch of glee. I wonder, a little viciously, whether Mr Hinch has ever killed a wasp, whether he would recognise being bothered by a wasp as an encounter with a natural world both incomprehensible by, and often hostile to, human perception'. Perhaps that apprehension of the natural world only works on the grand, spiritual scale of escape from self and from unwelcome humanity. Perhaps it requires a spectacular landscape, while the local and familiar - and small, common species - do not count, because they do not deliver the same heady experience.
In the end of course I have to confront what is really irritating me: my argument with Jim Hinch is an argument with myself. Annoyingly, I recognise the shadow of my own attitudes in his. I, too, carry in me unexamined notions about the purity and autonomy of the natural world. I am shaped by the same cultural values into an exclamatory response to wilderness on a grand scale."
3. "All the worst clichés pertain for me, and demonstrate just how clichés operate: some notionally more 'real' or authentic experience than the shared experience in the Dyfi Osprey Observatory, or on the flat maintained paths on Skomer, or in an RSPB hide with a wheelchair ramp. But my private moment of encounter is not more authentic than a shared one. It is the result of many invisible privileges - that weighty, overburdened word - that not everyone has. The judgement that says, even if only secretly, that it is more real, or more authentic than, say, a child for the first time seeing an osprey from an observatory, is simply an expression of exclusivity and implicit hostility
- as is dictating the 'right' attitude to take to swifts, or the 'proper' approach to take in nature writing.
It's threatening to open up the boundaries of your group to include others who might not share your values or attitudes, because to do so might change the nature of your experience. It can be the case with any group, notional or real. I, for one, don't want to change. Sullenly I resist the idea that the value and authenticity of an experience that I care about is based on my enjoying certain privileges. They don't feel like privileges - but then privilege never does feel like privilege: experientially it is always relative, not absolute. There is always someone else you can point to who has more advantages than you, as though this somehow diminishes or even cancels out your own advantages."
April 20, 2023
I loved this book. Whilst I am not currently a birdwatcher, I am interested. Donahaye's perspective did more than pique my curiosity, it completely absorbed me.
This is an author with a lifelong fascination in the ornithology world whose writing nudges (shoves?) the feminist perspective of the white male volumes on the countryside. For me, this stands beside Caroline Criado Perez' Invisible Women whose forensic examination of design shows how women have been disregarded. This book is the equivalent in the natural world. So sharp and just so right.
From the mansplaining implicit in the title to guide books the male overlay of controlling the subject is so evident once pointed out. Female birds illustrated (or not at all) behind their male counterparts, birds assumed to be male unless "female" is inserted in the text. Whether to rename birds in the post-colonial context parallels the central "debate".
Despite the challenging thoughts, this is written with humour. The outdoors folks expectation, as tourists, of seeing certain birds on certain days in certain places mocks the inherence of "wildlife" and wild and free is what Donahaye loves. Such a great quirky read.
This is an author with a lifelong fascination in the ornithology world whose writing nudges (shoves?) the feminist perspective of the white male volumes on the countryside. For me, this stands beside Caroline Criado Perez' Invisible Women whose forensic examination of design shows how women have been disregarded. This book is the equivalent in the natural world. So sharp and just so right.
From the mansplaining implicit in the title to guide books the male overlay of controlling the subject is so evident once pointed out. Female birds illustrated (or not at all) behind their male counterparts, birds assumed to be male unless "female" is inserted in the text. Whether to rename birds in the post-colonial context parallels the central "debate".
Despite the challenging thoughts, this is written with humour. The outdoors folks expectation, as tourists, of seeing certain birds on certain days in certain places mocks the inherence of "wildlife" and wild and free is what Donahaye loves. Such a great quirky read.
May 29, 2024
This book was recommended to me by a friend who happens to know Jasmine the author. I wasn’t sure what to expect but once started I was fascinated by the way Jasmine shared her passion for not only birds but British wildlife in general. The book skips fluently from flashes of her life story, both wonderful and traumatic back to nature with effortless ease. Parts of this book can draw a tear and parts will make you laugh to yourself .. definitely going to read her life story ‘Losing Israel’ very soon. Brilliant.
April 8, 2023
I really enjoyed these essays, set in mid-Wales, and taking different perspectives each time, from observations of a rotting badger, to sharing her home with animals, and being 'birdsplained' to then becoming a 'birdsplainer' herself (while in hospital). Really lucid writing, reminiscent of Kathleen Jamie, who she acknowledges as an influence.
December 18, 2025
I found the book hard to get through but also I think I was expecting a different book. If you were a birder or someone interested in the birdwatching community and history then it would be more enjoyable.
March 31, 2023
It’s not about birds. Feminist claptrap in essay form.
September 25, 2023
4.5. felt very personal to me
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews