Drew Monkman

The other day I was watching a robin on the lawn. It was continually sprinting and stopping, cocking its head and then seizing a worm in a lightning-fast strike. Normally, I would have thought little of this, but a new book by paleontologist Steve Brusatte has changed how I look at birds. I wasn’t just observing an everyday songbird but a true, surviving dinosaur.

One of my favourite rites of spring is taking in the dawn chorus — the exuberant morning bird concert that begins about an hour before sunrise. This past Sunday, my friend Brian Wales and I drove to the large marsh at the north end of Fairbairn Street — an area offering diverse habitats — to enjoy the performance. We arrived at 4:20 a.m. beneath a bright, third-quarter moon, just as the eastern sky was just beginning to illuminate.

When I was 10 years old, my grandmother gave me Roger Tory Peterson’s classic nature book “A Field Guide to the Birds” for Christmas. It quickly became one of my most prized possessions. I spent hours poring over Peterson’s evocative illustrations, dreaming of charismatic species I’d never seen, like great grey owls and scarlet tanagers. I even had my mother quiz me on the flight silhouettes at the back of the book until I knew them by heart.