The Urban Bestiary: Encountering The Everyday Wild, by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

Sometimes less is more, and sometimes a bit of restraint on ambition would be a far more satisfying read than what one gets when one aims for too much and falls short, or at least aims for too much to appeal to all of one’s readers. This is a book that could have been pretty great, but as it is it ends up being alright, with a marked anti-biblical bias that makes it less enjoyable of a read than it could have been, even though it is self-consciously modeled on the bestiaries of the (nominally) Christian Middle Ages. At its heart, the book reveals itself to be the fruit of someone who is fascinated by the worth of myth but cannot recognize the truths of the Bible, and that approach severely limits the appeal of this book to people of faith, who surely represent a far larger potential audience of the book than the author appears to recognize. If we assume the author to be one of those urban Progressives that does not think about rural people or conservatives except to abhor them, this would make sense of the author’s strange blindness towards tone and how the tone of this book could have been greatly improved.

To the extent that one is able to overlook or forgive the offensive tone of the author, there is a lot of genuine interest here in the author’s odd conception of animals who have made their home in the cities and brought wildlife to urban and suburban dwellers. With an author concerned with supposed “eco-poetical truths” and who makes her home in Seattle and has made her reputation as an author about birds, it is little surprise that this book is heavily biased towards birds, although admittedly they are pretty easy as far as wild animals go to encounter. It seems, perhaps strangely enough, that I have encountered more wild animals than the author has in my own life, though I am not sure why this is the case. Strangely enough, though the author focuses on birds, she does not mention one of the most salient parts of encountering birds in the contemporary built-in environment, and that is the way that some birds have rather annoyingly picked up car alarms and other wretched sounds as calls to make to other birds at all time of the day and night. Still, when the author is talking about animals and not her supposed insights as an “eco-philosopher,” there is a lot to enjoy here.

In terms of its contents, this book is a bit more than 300 pages in length and is divided into four parts. The book begins with an introduction that shows the author’s process and her ambitions for the work. The author then discusses how to enter the bestiary (I), with chapters on the author’s view of a new nature and the lost art of urban tracking, something the author appears to overemphasize. The second part of the book consists of the author’s thoughts of furry wild animals, including coyotes, moles, raccoons, possums, squirrels (and rats), as well as black bears and cougars, pointing out the sometimes irrational behaviors that mankind adopts towards these animals and the way that human presence is often far more dangerous to the animals than vice versa (II). The author then turns her attention to birds, examining birds as a whole, starlings, house sparrows, and pigeons, chickadees, crows, hawks and owls, and chickens (III). This is followed by the final part of the book, which examines branched and rooted beings like trees and (strangely) humans. The book then ends with acknowledgements, a select bibliography, and an index.