Birding Babylon: A Soldier’s Journal from Iraq (Sierra Club Books), is the tale of a Connecticut Army National Guardman's obsession with nature, even in the grim face of a desert ravaged by war and death.

The book is a product of Sergeant First Class Jonathan Trouern-Trend’s war-time blog, Birdng Babylon, a look beyond the barbed wire in search of the life that was all around him during his yearlong tour of duty in Iraq.

“In Iraq there are ten thousand ways to see the world,” he writes. “I consider myself lucky to have seen it through the eyes of a naturalist.” By trading in violence and chaos for natural beauty, Trouern-Trend focuses on what he describes as the “resiliency of life…in the face of crisis.”

Though his tour of duty ended in February 2005, Trouern-Trend still blogs intermittently at Birding Babylon.