Reviewed by Donald A. Carr

Cerulean Blues first catches a reader’s eye and ear as a fetching little piece about a fetching little creature of the treetops, a colorful four-inch, nine-gram neo-tropical migrant whose numbers are falling as quickly and sadly as its native forests. The tiny warbler faces the double whammy of grinding habitat degradation in both its summer range in the northeastern and central United States and its winter territory on the slopes of the Andes. Although not officially listed as an endangered species (a serious sore spot for environmental advocacy groups), cerulean populations have been dropping 1 to 3 percent a year for the last several decades, with no end in sight. There is a truly sad ornithological song to be sung here, and Katie Fallon gives it all her breath.

The beauty of this slender volume, as well as its main challenge, is that it tries to reach a deeper personal level than that of the usual narrow-niche bird book. Although loaded with vivid details of the cerulean’s plumages, behaviors, prey base, nesting sites and amazing migratory marathons, the book is actually more engaging as the coming-of-age memoir of a bright, idealistic, 20-something creative-writing instructor who is re-sinking her roots in the hills and hollows of Appalachia. Fallon’s roost is in the environs of Virginia Tech and West Virginia University, where she lives with her husband, Jesse, an equally woodsy, pony-tailed veterinarian, and Mr. Bones, the frisky part-beagle they adopted early in their time as a couple. Well-educated throwbacks unmotivated by money, they would prefer the Appalachians restored to the state of nature prior to modern consumer society and human malfeasance in the industrial-scale extraction of natural resources.

Fallon is so filled with infectious wonder of wild things and wild places that it’s impossible not to find her charming. She is pretty much everything you would want your daughter to be at that age: caring, centered and relentlessly curious. She is also confident enough to disclose tender, excessive anxieties about whether, as the “invading writer,” she fits in with the scientifically trained and experienced members of the government’s Cerulean Warbler Technical Working Group (not the least of which is that heading into the woods on a bird-banding trip with several senior male field biologists, she is so fastidious as to worry whether her deodorant has quit working).

The trouble with the book is that, for all the “excellent adventures” she narrates in chasing down elusive ceruleans in Appalachia and Colombia, Fallon’s life experience is still far too short and safe to be much of a foundation for successful memoir. She and Jesse, camping in a West Virginia forest, are frightened into spilling out their illegal cups of chardonnay when a ranger pulls up in his truck, but this isn’t exactly the stuff that sells autobiography. One huge exception to the pattern of peace and security in Fallon’s life gets short shrift: She devotes just seven pages to the mass murder on April 15, 2006, of 33 students at Virginia Tech’s Norris Hall. One of them was a freshman Fallon had taught the previous semester, slaughtered by a deranged gunman who was also an English major — “one of our own.” The massacre occurred just weeks before Fallon was scheduled to participate in a field study of ceruleans in spring migration as they arrived from South America to jockey for mates and territories in the Appalachians. Until that time, despite a budding “obsession” with the ceruleans’ plight, Fallon had never actually seen one. In the wake of the tragedy, she considered cancelling the trip, but “Jesse insisted that I go … reminded me, at times not so gently, that I must keep living, that I couldn’t let this ruin my life.”

Cerulean Blues isn’t the first book to take off on the theme of Emily Dickinson’s wonderful poem “Hope Is the Thing With Feathers,” and hopefully it won’t be the last. Fallon’s effort falls a little short, but it’s an inspiring portrait of youth finding optimism and renewed sense of purpose in the face of life’s adversities. If that isn’t something “that perches in the soul,” then I don’t know what is.

Donald A. Carr is an environmental lawyer, a birder and the author of a forthcoming biography of Elliot Richardson.