Because of Birds

In this heart warming book, Nancy Ortenstone tells a true story about the many different birds who came into her life, first to horrify but then to inspire and guide her through the difficult period when she had to learn to let her two daughters take flight from the nest. While she is helping birds caught in cages, or with broken wings or lost voices, to be well again, or watching them in the full majesty of their freedom, they are showing her how to mature both into motherhood and into the life of the writer and painter she has become.

A hummingbird, a mourning dove, a Mexican songbird, a blue heron and most importantly a peking duck, with whom she forms a deep bond, are among the many friends who fly into her life to share in deeply felt adventures of mutual healing and transformation.

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Nature comes calling in this beautiful, moving book that reminds us of the old stories of saints and mystics who learned to speak a language of animals. Ortenstone speaks the language of birds. She's no saint, but rather a very warm, very human mother with an uncanny ability to get messages from creatures she befriends in Mexico and Minnesota. Her artist's eye delights the reader with images from her garden, her dreams-reality as she perceives it. Deeply colorful and wise, it unravels the complexities of the human heart with the timeless simplicity of a story well told.

- Nor Hall, Author of The Moon and the Virgin and Those Women