BERKELEY, CALIF. — For those who know how to look, Santa Cruz is a birder’s paradise. From titanic redwood groves to the jeweled beaches of Monterey Bay, this swath of California’s Central coast is home to a vast array of avian life. Sophie Wood Brinker not only knows how to look, but she knows what that looking means. In Birds of Santa Cruz, out this summer, she takes us on a journey through the county’s feathered friends. Hand-illustrated by Sophie herself, readers will learn about the remarkable language of the Steller’s Jay and the skydances of Red-shouldered Hawks. 

A short introduction grounds the book in the importance of noticing and knowing the creatures with whom we share the Earth, and offers up birding and nature journaling as collective practices of love, attention, and resistance. How can we live with birds better? What can we learn from their ways of being in the world? Quoting Dorothy Day, Sophie asks “how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?” 

The answer might begin in the practice of learning the names and voices of our neighbor birds. It might begin with the knowledge that, after wildfire, the nests of Acorn Woodpeckers are used for safe shelter by displaced animals. Birds of Santa Cruz is for the experienced birder and the novice, the activist and the artist, the visitor and the longtime resident.  With breathtaking, full-color paintings of the 25 species of birds she describes, Sophie Wood Brinker’s book is that rare guidebook that, like poetry, delights as much as it instructs. 

Birds of Santa Cruz is the fifth volume in Heyday’s beloved bird series, which also includes Oliver James’s Birds of Berkeley, Alex Harris’s Birds of Lake Merritt, Keith Hansen’s Birds of Point Reyes and Aaron N.K. Haiman’s Birds of the California Delta. It debuts this May, in the heart of spring migration.