This book is about the sad decline of a parent with dementia and the difficulties and grief involved in that experience. Simultaneously, the author is writing about her "assignment" of observing a particular shorebird each day to record all observable changes as well as consistent behaviors. Cerulean is well aware of the decline of much of nature as she is of her father's gradual loss of his life, but she focuses on doing what she can in each circumstance by mindful and loving focus on each.

Thank you to the publisher for my copy - all opinions are my own.

This seemed like the perfect book for Non-fiction November, and I am so, SO glad I picked this one up when I did. This might be one of the mostly beautifully lyrical memoirs I have ever read, and I was actually sad that it ended. I feel like Susan's voice is still echoing in my mind.

It reads like a love letter to her father, as she cared for him throughout his disease, and I cried more than once as it led me to reflect on my own relationship with my dad. I loved the way Susan tied her journey of care for her father to her work, and tie of those two completely opposite loves together. Blending science and art, this is truly one of the most unique reads I have ever come across.

I so thoroughly enjoyed this - a recommendation for any book lover looking for something wonderfully, beautifully, remarkably unique and touching.

A beautiful memoir of caring for a parent with dementia. The author compares the plight of our planet with her father's dementia--both deteriorating helplessly. The emphasis, however, is on her father, Robert, as he declines first in New Jersey under his wife's care. When his wife dies suddenly, author Susan Cerulean moves him to Florida to be closer to her. At first, he flourishes in the new environment, but gradually, time and the disease take their toll.

In this compassionate account, Cerulean frankly describes the frustration of caring for a patient with dementia, but always remembers that as heartbreaking as it is to care for a loved one, what they are experiencing is far worse. Although there is sadness, the book is primarily one of hope and beauty. #IHaveBeenAssignedTheSingleBird #NetGalley

Braiding narratives of her father's dementia with that of the loss of habitat that endangers bird life in and around coastal Florida, Susan Cerulean's memoir is an insightful contemplation of the state of the world, laced with a fabulously rich narrative. "How is the dementia we are inflicting on our world similar to a dementing illness in a single human brain?" asks Cerulean. Manmade climate crisis, mindless urban development, elderly care, disadvantaged labour force, and contemporary American politics are some of the topics Cerulean touches upon in her book. Deeply felt and observed, if this thoughtful slim book provokes debates at least at dinner tables, it'll be a success for the author.

Cerulean is very knowledgable about migration patterns of coastal birds. She speaks to this and gives delicate, yet sharp visuals of her love for nature. The same can be said of her descriptions of watching her father slowly deteriorate from his illness. One that will eventually kill him.


She weaves the two topics into one, and even though it's sad, she also gives a beautiful story about watching an ailing parent slip away.


I was moved several times by her way of writing. It's so hard to watch a parent die, and I imagine, even more so to write about it, and be immersed in that feeling for a long enough time to focus and tell the story.


I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird publishes 8.1.2020.


5/5 Stars

Susan Cerulean uses lovely prose to connect the slow degradation of her father's mind to dementia with her stewardry of wild Florida shorebirds in the of context of man-made climate change. I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird deals with some "heavy" themes, but the reading of it is made easy by how eloquently Cerulean writes, rife in emotion and metaphor. The stories she relates of her father's time in care facilities and hospice are often both funny and heartbreaking; an 80+ year old man in pullups who is also dead set on marrying his caregiver.

Interspersed throughout the narrative are sections on Cerulean's experiences with the shorebirds in Florida during which she finds both comfort in the natural world and horror at the damage we have done and that we continue to do. In these dual narratives we find the overarching theme: that it is often better to start as the steward of one single thing and do whatever you can to see that you impart the most dignity and care possible.

**I was given a copy of this book by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. My thanks to University of Georgia Press**

I was first introduced to naturalist Susan Cerulean's crystalline prose in her book Tracking Desire: A Journey After Swallow-tailed Kites (University of Georgia Press, 2005), in which she depicts a personal awakening to the natural world through her fascination with the swallow-tailed kite. The book forever changed the way I look up at the sky.

Now, in her new book, I Was Assigned the Single Bird, Cerulean recounts her growing awareness of the looming ecological crisis thanks to overdevelopment and climate change with the parallel story of her personal journey to care for her aging father, who suffers from dementia. The two stories -- a wildlife advocate's dread of the demise of the natural world and a daughter's heartbreaking witness to her father's slow diminishment -- correlate in ways that Cerulean with her keen, careful eye is especially attuned to.

Here she writes of the peril of our natural world: "The tide was low when I arrived. Ghost crabs constructed their kingdoms on the expansive shingle of the shore. Over the course of hours, the tide rose, corsetting all of us species -- shorebirds, crab, and human -- against the grasses and oats growing on the dunes. The day's tidal range reminded me of the larger geological rhythms of the planet and how the seas were rising and would continue to do so."

Through her work writing wildlife guides and designing nature programs for the public, Cerulean runs up against the hard realities facing Florida's ecosystems. The outlook is dire. It's just as dire for her father as Alzheimer's encroaches on his mind and old age saps the strength from his body. She describes her father's struggle to adapt to his limitations: "Dad felt the currents of activity flowing around him in the room and understood that little of it had to do, in that moment, with him. He thrust himself into the flow of flying words, and the back-and-forth, summoning his best effort at communicating his needs, his state of being."

At the beginning of the book, her father is in the early stages of Alzheimer's but soon enough his loving but beleaguered wife is no longer able to care for him. So Cerulean does what so many children of aging parents have to do: divides her life between a parent living in a distant state and her own home and family. As she desperately searches for ways to enrich her father's crumbling life, Cerulean must also help her fledgling son as he leaves for college in New England, far from their Florida home. In some ways she's like the snowy plover that she patiently observes, trying to distract death from her chick. Eventually, she moves her father into a facility near her house where she finally surrenders to her own limitations in creating a life of dignity for him. She comes to realize that her role as witness is as important as her role of savior.

In chapters that often read like lyrical essays on the loss of a beloved father's faculties and physical abilities in conjunction with the loss of habitat for Florida's once abundant wildlife, Cerulean's voice is a clarion call for us to pay excruciating attention to the world around us.

Susan Cerulean is a master weaver, deftly intertwining seemingly disparate themes into finely wrought, complex tapestries. In her latest book, I have Been Assigned the Single Bird, her lifelong evolution as an advocate for wild birds and their conservation, loops in and around her father’s long devolution after he receives a diagnosis of dementia. Her poetic prose and keen observations transport us - we travel by kayak to a spoil island and marvel at the beauty and fragility of a shorebird nest; we sit at her father’s bedside and feel fear and apprehension about the inevitable unraveling of memory. These intimate, unflinching portraits are inspired and haunting, infused with equal parts passion and compassion, loss and lament. I have Been Assigned the Single Bird is a paean to family and the natural world. With Cerulean’s compelling call to action, readers will want to advocate for both.

I received an arc of this book from NetGalley for an honest review. This book was both lovely and hard to read. It intertwines the story of taking care of a parent with dementia and the loss and death of that parent and her volunteer work with a shorebirds project. I was originally drawn to the picture of the Oyster Catcher on the cover but found the book to be so much more.