Seattle is the Capital of Crow Planet
Local author and naturalist Lyanda Lynn Haupt talks about her latest book, Crow Planet, Friday, July 31, at the Elliott Bay Book Company. 7:30 p.m., free admission. Her blog is called The Tangled Nest.
More than one reviewer has found a Thoreauvian echo in Lyanda Lynn Haupt's Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness--besides crows' antic intelligence (studies indicate crows may have as much smarts as apes), Haupt has had living deliberately on her mind for some time.
For us Seattle residents, there's a double treat in reading about her West Seattle neighborhood, the crow she's named Charlotte who perches on an electrical wire outside her window, and watching crows shell snails on rocks at Alki. Like David "Street-Smart Naturalist" Williams, she reminds us of what we're missing simply because we don't stop to look.
Yet, as suits a book about the over-determined, portentous crow, there's an urgency to Haupt's eloquent, thoughtful writing. Early on, she points out that there "are more crows than there have ever been in the history of the earth. [...] The spread of human-made habitations, urban and suburban, has pressed humans and crows into unprecedented nearness, and uneasy relationship." And, "Abundant crows are an emblem of rampant habitat destruction..."
In the U.S. there's about one crow for every ten people. In Seattle, it feels closer to a one-to-one ratio, especially during late spring and early summer, when zealous parent crows dive bomb you for getting too close to their nesting young. Right now, during our heat wave, you can catch crows cooling off beneath shade trees, their wings spread and beaks open. You learn a lot--a lot--about crows reading Haupt's book, but you also learn that they're the canary in the coal mine, so to speak, for charting the progress of the West Nile Virus.
And you learn about Haupt's personal journey as a naturalist, as a writer, as a mother--she lets her daughter Claire go barefoot at the beach, wayward glass fragments be damned, but also embarrasses her horribly by hanging their wash on a line. She lets readers in on her "no good reason" depression, when she found it hard to get out of bed each day.
As that disclosure suggests, the book is not all "neat!" discovery--through crows, she contemplates death in the natural order of things. She quotes Aldo Leopold: "In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial." She goes to a monastery for a retreat. In so doing--and noting--she produces a remarkably lived-in guide to being (or becoming) a naturalist. Of everything we've read this year, this should be that book that "Seattle Reads."
