Crow planet Essential wisdom from the urban wilderness

Lyanda Lynn Haupt

Book - 2009

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Subjects
Published
New York, NY : Little, Brown and Co 2009.
Language
English
Main Author
Lyanda Lynn Haupt (-)
Edition
1st ed
Physical Description
x, 229 p. : ill. ; 22 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (p. 223-229).
ISBN
9780316019101
  • Crows and Kairos: an invocation
  • Getting up: a reluctant crow watcher
  • Preparing: a crash course for the urban naturalist
  • Reading: crow stories and animal alphabets
  • Walking: the wildness of home
  • Dwelling: how we nest
  • Helping: an uncertain grace
  • Seeing: the monk, the professor, and the sense of wonder
  • Coexisting: finding our place in the zoöpolis
  • Dying: crows of death and life
  • Flying: wings, reality, hope.
Review by New York Times Review

WHEN she set out to write about the crow - the black sheep of the avian world - the naturalist Lyanda Lynn Haupt didn't relish the task. "I never meant to watch crows especially," she admits in her curiously personal and thought-provoking meditation, "Crow Planet." "Whenever I ask someone about chickadees or robins or flickers or other common birds . . . the response is almost always lackluster, noncommittal or at best blandly cheerful." Crows, however, sometimes elicit raves ("They are so intelligent! And beautiful!"), but far more often insults ("loud," "poopy," "evil," "menacingly bold," "harbingers of death"). Haupt knew the dark history that fed this distaste. During the plague years in medieval Europe, crows "scavenged the bodies lying uncovered in the streets." In 1666, she writes, after the great fire of London, so many crows descended on the victims that Charles II ordered a campaign against them to calm a horrified populace. And yet, as she trained her binoculars on the familiar but spooky creatures in her yard, Haupt found aspects of the corvid family that argued for more respect. Did you know that crows recognize human faces? To prove this, she writes, a researcher at the University of Washington conducted an experiment. Volunteers who had captured and banded crows (something crows resent) while wearing caveman masks were cawed at and dive-bombed whenever they re-entered crow precincts. When the same volunteers walked through the crow zone with their faces hidden by Dick Cheney masks, "the crows left them entirely alone." (Presumably, this reflected no political bias.) Affectingly, Haupt describes "crow funerals" in which a "stillness" settles around a deceased bird as other crows "cluster about the crow in perfect silence," and records evidence of crows at play - basking in the sun, "sprawled on one side with their wings hanging open . . . like black-feathered Madame Bovarys" or catching falling cherry blossoms. She knows that by publishing such observations, she risks criticism from the scientific community: studies "must not resort to anecdote" or "anthropomorphize their subject," she scolds herself. And yet, she maintains, she can't faithfully portray the interlaced world of man and crow without sharing such stories. She prefers the more open-minded, questing inquiry of earlier students of the natural world like Thoreau and Louis Agassiz, and patterns her own research technique on St. Benedict's thoughtful reading practice, allowing a "contemplative flow" to settle upon her watching. Like human beings, Haupt explains, crows are one of the "few prominent, dominant, successful species" that prosper in the modern world. Their hardiness means they will outlast more fragile species. Before we revile them, she suggests, we ought to understand that there are so many of them because there are so many of us. Because we have built, they have come, and crows and humans today must coexist in the "zoöpolis," the "overlap of human and animal geographies." In a lyrical narrative that blends science and conscience, Haupt mourns the encroachments of urbanization, but cherishes the wildness that survives. She has learned to appreciate, "but not quite love," the crow. And while she may hesitate to anthropomorphize the bird, she is unable to avoid, in one instance, caninifying it - comparing a brood of fledglings who landed on her lawn and uprooted her seedling carrots to playful Labrador puppies. She gently spritzed the young crows with a hose, hoping they'd flutter away and spare her crop. "Instead," she writes, "all four of them gathered under the spray, flapped their wings and opened their bills, in what appeared to be absolute joy. I laughed, but in that slightly imbalanced way that could turn into crying if someone looked at me the wrong way." Over the next few days, she brought out the hose again so they could play some more. Perhaps, then, it's time to update the grisly collective noun (so unlike "an exaltation of larks" or a "paddling of ducks") that's been applied to these birds: not a "murder of crows" but a "litter." It's an apt expression in more ways than one. Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Haupt, former raptor rehabilitator and seabird researcher, embarks on an urban ornithological expedition to defend the honor of the crow, the ubiquitous bird whose corvid family precedes Homo sapiens by several million years and whose symbolic and actual role as a scavenger and "liaison" between life and death evokes reactions ranging from revulsion to awe. Attracted to the sight of the birds nesting in her backyard, the author follows them as they forage in the moss along neighborhood streets and cavort in a nearby wildlife preserve. Her forays into Seattle's "tenacious wild" demonstrate evidence of the crow community's social complexity, their extensive vocabulary and fierce loyalty to their mates and species, Haupt enlivens her observations with tidbits from crow mythology and history, discovering that their bad press dates to the 14th-century outbreak of the bubonic plague when the birds scavenged the dead bodies lying in the streets, "beginning, horribly, with the eyeballs." Despite some awkward prose, Haupt succeeds in humanizing the object of her naturalist obsession and affection. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Haupt (Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds) delivers a delightful meditation on our role in the natural world. By focusing on the proliferation of the American crow, she provides a rich context for exploring the relationship between humans and nature. Crows are one of the most easily identifiable, intelligent, and prolific birds whose abundance stems from their unique ability to cohabitate with humans. Haupt contends that with a little effort, humans can tap into the natural environment even in the most urban of areas. Verdict Highly recommended for birders but especially fans of Bernd Heinrich (The Mind of a Raven) and Marie Winn (Central Park in the Dark).-Diana Hartle, Univ. of Georgia Lib., Athens (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A self-described posthippie ecofeminist offers a quiet, genial book of "hopeful possibility" amid the current ecological crisis. Wildlife researcher and rehabilitator Haupt (Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent: The Importance of Everything and Other Lessons from Darwin's Lost Notebooks, 2006, etc.) writes gracefully about the interactions between crows and humans in the urban landscape and what those interactions portend for the future of the zopolis (where human and animal geographies overlap). For most people, notes the author, crows are the most commonly encountered native wild animal. Her fascination with the unusually intelligent birds began after a long depressive funk. One day she looked out her study window, saw an injured fledgling perched on an electrical wire and took the bird in. While nursing it back to health, she began to feel better. Haupt then spent two years studying the shiny black songbirds in her backyard and neighborhood. Found in growing numbersthere are more than 30 million in the United Statesin densely populated towns and suburbs, the omnivorous American Crow thrives on the detritus of modern urban life, consuming everything from road kill to bread crumbs, bagels and McDonald's fries. The author discovered that watching the creatures mate, nest, forage and help one another encouraged a necessary awareness of the continuity between human lives and that of other species. Like her beloved Thoreauwho wrote, "There is no wildness distant from ourselves"Haupt celebrates the interconnectedness of all life and urges readers to pay close attention to their home places. The chapter on the habits of amateur urban naturalists is a neat how-to guide for anyone interested in learning how the wild, nonhuman animals around us live. Even though we are unable to view our entire planet, she writes, we can take positive action by cultivating a sense of wonder at the wildlife at our door: "We practice wonder by resisting the temptation to hurry past things worth seeing." A fresh take on conscious living in the everyday world. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.