1.8.2017    Couple produces readable, colorful book on Texas birds

Author/professor Gary Clark has teamed up with his wife, photographer Kathy Clark, to produce the very readable and colorful Book of Texas Birds (Texas A&M University Press, $39.95 flexbound). The 512-page book is thorough, fun to read, and richly illustrated with hundreds of color photos.

Clark said he set out to write the book as “a personal account of Texas birds,” with the first draft being basically off the top of his head. (Technical corrections and additions based on source material would come later.) And that’s how it reads, written informally and conversationally, like a friend telling another friend about the interesting birds he has observed, with a color picture of each one.

A few examples:

•  “Mountain bluebirds always look to me as if they were born from some sky god because of their unmatchable sky-blue color.”
•  “As a college professor, I’m rather partial to the ovenbird because the male’s song resembles the words teacher-teacher-teacher.”
•  “I brake for red-headed woodpeckers. I don’t see them as often as I did when I was a boy, so I brake to make sure I get a good look at these uncommon birds with uncommonly handsome plumage.”
•  “Let’s say you wanted to watch parrots in the wild instead of parrots in a cage. Where would you go? Mexico? No, you’d never have to leave Texas.”
•  “I doubt any human singer can match a mockingbird’s vocal endurance or its repertoire of songs.”

In addition to a one-page or so personal essay on each species, Clark provides factual details about what it eats, how it sounds, and where it can be found in Texas. Book of Texas Birds should be especially interesting to serious birders, but even the most casual observer of birds will find much to enjoy in the Clarks’s delightful volume.

Chocolate gravy: Have you ever had chocolate gravy? I’ve never heard of it, or hadn’t until I perused a cookbook by Linda Ponder of Bryan, formerly of Ballinger.

“I’ve never met another person outside our family who eats chocolate gravy,” Ponder writes in Aunt Linda’s Lovin’ Oven. “It is a breakfast dish, made in the cast iron skillet and served spooned over leftover hot rolls, biscuits or toast or just plain white bread.”

Ponder includes that recipe with other favorites such as ham and sweet potato breakfast pie, Italian chicken salad, old-fashioned beef stew, and Nanny’s skillet cookies. For more information about where to purchase the cookbook ($10 spiral-bound), e-mail the author at AuntLindaCooks@gmail.com.

Glenn Dromgoole’s latest book is West Texas StoriesContact him at g.dromgoole@suddenlink.net.

>> Read his past Texas Reads columns in Lone Star Literary Life here.