Customer Reviews

Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds: Notes from a Northwest Year

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As someone who enjoys watching and identifying birds, this book naturally caught my interest. Once reading, I couldn't wait to get to the next essay! The book gives more meaning to my encounters with ALL birds. And just when one might be tempted to say or think "It's only a silly Starling (or Crow, or Sparrow, etc.)," amazing and wondrously described details about these birds' history, biology, taxonomy, behavior, or physiology will not only prompt one to seek out ordinary birds, but experience them on a different level. It has been similar to studying music, and subsequently gaining an appreciation for it that only those who "know" can understand. It's funny, incredibly informative, and a perfect read for anyone interested in the feathered creatures that are right out in the open with us every day. Enthusiastically recommended!

In the final chapter of this sincere work, Lyanda Lynn Haupt slips in a quotation from Stephen Kellert that suggests her own aim in writing: "People will need to rekindle their capacity for experiencing wonder, inspiration, and joy from contact with the natural world". Such delighted sentiment permeates the work as a whole. Haupt celebrates the varied reactions she and her friends and family have to a set of birds which are not the celebrities of the avian world: starlings, crows, cormorants. Her vignettes combine her knowledge of birds, of the birdwatching community, and her personal experiences. Her first chapter ends by saying, "Birds will give you a window, if you allow them", and this book looks at the moment when the shutters swing open.

Her emphasis on human reaction to birds plays to her strengths as a writer. Some of her finest lines encapsulate the meaning of a visual impression while partially eliding the image itself: she writes of the snowy owl, after referring to the way every feature of its design is taken to an extreme (e.g., "impossibly sharp talons"), "They are all we can imagine them to be." Haupt's power and interest is less in physical description (although there are some vividly amusing analogies: the "scrunched" face of a Vaux's Swift makes the species "a little avian Pekinese"). Instead, she concentrates on the kinds of emotion and thought which any individual bird encounter can touch off for a watcher.

The limits of human understanding-and the charms of those limits-plays into a larger theme of the book. Haupt declares her intent to steer a course between the Scylla of scientific arcana and cold observation and the Charybdis of "response-ists" who attempt to experience and enjoy a world untainted by human names and knowledge. At times she can drift to one side or the other-either in the form of occasionally rote descriptions of nesting habits or overly fanciful evocations of fairies-and the relative success of the passages where the two impulses are balanced prove her own point. She conveys her delight in the way the Varied Thrush produces its distinct song as gracefully as she does her experience of the song itself.

Ultimately, this book depends on an audience looking to evoke a joy previously experienced, to explore a familiar enchantment and comprehend it better. Haupt, as one who has worked to induce that joy in others, has an intelligent grasp of its workings and vagaries. Her book warmly invites others to share in her insights and, through them, re-experience their own delights.

Human beings often think of the human world as the central point from which all earthly existence radiates, with birds and other animals mere background. Lyanda Lynn Haupt sweeps the reader effortlessly into another world-- the world of birds. By bringing the daily habits, troubles and foibles of birds of the Pacific Northwest to light, and painting these birds in refreshing verbal watercolors, the author succeeds in showing humans that the bird world is not a backdrop to human existence but a whole other sphere of existence unto itself. She muses about the supernatural qualities of the hermit thrush's song, the humorous (by human standards) mating dance of the blue grouse, the hyperactivity of the missile-like swift, even the dual nature of the lives of migratory birds who can be at home in two radically different places in the span of one year. Read this book and be drawn into a separate world of avian wonder!

As an amateur birder, I will never look at birds (ordinary and otherwise) in the same way again. Wonderfully written. Can't wait for the next one.
I checked this book out of the library - but will be purchasing it for myself and my darling daughter who got me into birding.

Lyanda Lynn Haupt captures something with this book that is hard to describe. I am not a birder, but I have come to look at birds mostly because of her book Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness. I bought a really nice set of binoculars and Ibirds Pro so I could identify the birds I could now see better at 8-16 power. I think I would have given up on the whole bird list thing (which I guess, reading this book is called "twitching) but instead Rare Encounters gives personality to the common birds I was just starting to see. As I read her book while camping on top of a mountain I spent much more time watching the black-eyed junkos and ravens. I realized there was a pattern to what they were doing and I connected the songs of the junko to the little bird that pecks stuff off the snow.

Lyanda's work in this, her first book, is beautiful. She captures the bird not as some anthropomorphized personality but instead as creature worth watching, observing, and understanding. Her second to last chapter, Crow Stories, hints at the love of crows she brought in her third book. Both are now treasured hardbounds. I was not even done with Rare encounters before I recommended it to a stranger. An unusual thing for me and requiring a book that is truly.....beautiful.

Buy this little hard back book. Put it in your bag. Carry it out to where there are birds. Read it in the out of doors. Watch individual birds and learn a bit about them. Worry less about lists and more about birds. Less about accomplishing and more about living.

I was given a copy of this book years ago and loved it. I loaned it and never saw it again and have missed it ever since. It is charming, inspiring and makes me want to be more appreciative of what is around me always. It would make a perfect gift.