Graeme Gibson, a birder and author of The Bedside Book of Birds, which
has just been published by Doubleday , will be giving a presentation at
6:00 pm tomorrow evening, Tuesday November 1, at the Elliott Bay Book
Company located at 101 South Main Street in Seattle .

Graeme Gibson, is chairman and founder of the Pelee Island Bird
Observatory in Ontario


THE BEDSIDE BOOKS OF BIRDS: An Avian Miscellany (Nan A.
Talese/Doubleday; October 25, 2005; Hardcover), an extraordinary tribute
to the richly varied relationships we have established with birds during
the hundreds of thousands of years that we and they have shared life on
earth.

Grame Gibson is the acclaimed author of Five Legs, Communion, Perpetual
Motion, and Gentleman Death. A past president of PEN Canada, he is the
recipient of both the Harbourfront Festival Prize and the Toronto Arts
Award, and is a member of the Order of Canada. Long involved in
conservation issues, he has been an active councilmember of World
Wildlife Fund Canada and currently serves as chairman of the Pelee
Island Bird Observatory, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the study
and conservation of birds that he co-founded in 2003. For many years,
in the guise of "The Great Auk," he lead birding tours to Ecuador and
Cuba and, with his wife Margaret Atwood, he was instrumental in
facilitating the World Wildlife Fund's pioneering work with the Cuban
government in 1988 to protect the Zapata wetlands.

With the devotion of a birder and a hoarder of words, Graeme Gibson has
spent the past fifteen years collecting the literary and artistic forms
our affinity for birds has taken over the centuries. Knitted together
by his own though-provoking essays, THE BEDSIDE BOOK OF BIRDS gives rich
representation to the roles that birds have played in the mythology,
folk tales, art, and literature of many cultures. So too, it brings to
life the fascination that birds hold for science, as the Galapagos
finches did for Darwin, as well as the myriad ways in which birds have
been used by humankind-as guides, omens, allegories, and companions, but
also, more grimly, as objects that have been feared, hunted, collected,
eaten, and even pressed into service as instruments of revenge and of
war.