National Geographic is one of those magazines that comes into the house, lands on the coffee table and stays there. When the pile of glossy magazines is tall enough, I take it to the basement. Every so often, I read one of them. This time, it’s “Why Birds Matter” from the January issue. I unearthed it this morning after hearing its author, the novelist Jonathan Franzen, talking about it on the radio yesterday.

Turns out, National Geographic and the Audubon Society have proclaimed 2018 the “Year of the Bird.” It’s the centennial of the 1918 Migratory Bird Act, the nation’s oldest conservation law, and in its honor the magazine has given us a rapturous piece about raptors, hornbills, parrots, owls, doves, crows, you name it.

“When someone asks me why birds are so important to me, all I can do is sigh and shake my head, as if I’ve been asked to explain whey I love my brothers,” Franzen writes. Birds are diverse as the world is diverse, they are also a link to our evolutionary past. They are smart and beautiful and playful (you can apparently watch a Youtube video of crows sledding). They sing, nest and raise their young and, most of all, they fly.

“The radical otherness of birds is integral to their beauty and their value,” Franzen writes. “They are always among us but never of us.”

In the words of Henry Beston, who I’ve quoted several times in this blog: “They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of time and life.”