NONFICTION - Jan. 19, 1992

THE FEATHER QUEST by Peter Dunne, photographs by Linda Dunne (Dutton: $25; 368 pp.). Of the many outdoor activities in which people indulge, bird-watching must seem among the most placid and conservative. Well, Peter Dunne shows another side of birding in “The Feather Quest,” and at times it’s downright surreal: birders who arrive well before dawn at a Baltimore sewage-treatment plant to catch sight of a stray Ross’ gull; who journey to the Godforsaken Aleutian island Attu to check off a handful of birds on their “North American Life Lists”; who plead with a priest-cum-bird-watcher in Texas to take them to one of the few haunts of the Mexican crow--the Brownsville city dump. Dunne, former director of the Cape May Bird Observatory in New Jersey, and his wife, photographer Linda Dunne, spent a year exploring more than a score of this continent’s avian hot spots, and the result is something like a grand tour of North American birding. Dunne’s writing can be overripe and overindulgent--replaying conversations with waitresses and childhood selves adds nothing to the book--but when he has a good, involved story to tell, Dunne’s light touch serves him well. The chapter on the birding tour of Attu (for die-hards only, at $4,200 per person despite the most primitive of accommodations) is nicely told, as is Dunne’s account of a recent World Series of Birding, a 24-hour species-counting marathon first organized by Dunne. Bird lovers, beware: “The Feather Quest” will make you want to hop into the car and head for southern Arizona, a hummingbird paradise.