My title “The Bird is the Word” dates me. It refers to a song from the 1960s that morphed into a surf–rock song, taken up more recently by the Family Guy and Big Bird on Sesame Street. What does it have to do with Virginia Woolf? It came to mind when I was free–associating about nature and words. Next I recalled Woolf's famous comment in “A Sketch of the Past” (1939). It ends, “we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself ” (M0B: 72). If “the bird is the word” and, more seriously, “we are the words,” then, the bird and we are one wiTheach other and also with an authentic mode of expression.

Relevant scholarship examines Woolf 's many bird images with their classical and medieval precedents and suggestions of continuity, community, or social commentary (e.g. Blyth, Ames, Leslie, Walker). As others note too, Woolf supported bird protection acts, but disliked the dogmatism and sentimentality of some proponents. Her graphic essay “The Plumage Bill” (1920) is a feminist response to those who blamed women's feathered hats exclusively for the torture and extinction of whole species of birds (Abbot). More philosophical studies of Woolf and nature focus on language (e.g. Waller, Walker, Sultzbach, Westling). Among all these insightful readings, however, are only brief references to British naturalist and ornithologist W. H. Hudson (1841–1922) (e.g. Blyth, Abbot, Walker). I want to use two of his books especially to create cultural contexts for Woolf's writing. When she reviewed Hudson's memoir Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life in 1918, she linked his interest in birds with his fl ights of words. In her later fiction, she re–envisioned Hudson's attempt in his bird–filled 1904 novel Green Mansions to express oneness with nature.

PART I: “I WISH I HAD SEEN HIM.”—V. WOOLF (L 2: 549)

In spite of differences in sex and socialization, age and reputation, Hudson and Woolf were surprisingly kindred spirits. Both had distinctive childhood experiences of non–urban places that reverberate throughout their writing.