A devout Christian, Bird believed Bible study and prayer were just as important to medical students as their academic studies.
An Eye on the Sparrow is a friendly, entertaining and educational book for anyone interested in birds, the Bible or just nature in general.
"We're the speckled people," his father declares, translating the Irish word breac to describe the family's mixed lineage, but also referring inadvertently to the speckled bird of the Bible, shunned by all other birds.
"An Eye on the Sparrow: The Bird Lover's Bible" by Sally Roth Happy Crab Publishing, 2013 ISBN 9781483962818 Softcover, 286 pp, illustrated.
But naturalist and prolific flora and fauna author Sally Roth has schooled me again in An Eye on the Sparrow: The Bird Lover's Bible.
I asked Roth what her favorite bird of the Bible was, and there's no surprise it's the sparrow (English sparrow or house sparrow, Passer Domesticus).
Porter's next three books, What I Have Done with Birds (1907), At the Foot of the Rainbow (1907), and Birds of the Bible (1909), met with a disappointing response, but A Girl of the Limberlost (1909) returned to the style and milieu of Freckles and was another popular success.
The nation's best known birder, David A. Sibley, whose book "The Sibley Guide to Birds" is a bible for field identification, has decided that the happy ending is too good to be true.
He co-authored Phylogeny and Classification of the Birds and Distribution and Taxonomy of Birds of the World, considered the bibles of bird classification, and was among the first to use DNA to establish avian relationships, Bowie said.
The Holy Bible abounds with birds, and tales of humans interacting with birds.
"Whenever a bird shows up in the Bible or any holy document, it's not a good sign.
