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Seattleâs premier avian scribe follows Mozartâs Starling with this look into how the âinnate connection between humans and the natural world is coming to the fore in a new way as academic research rises in support of truthsâ that are age-old. With an erudite and roving wit, Haupt writes about how trees can communicate with each other, and how we can connect with them simply by walking in the woods. And, of course, there are still birds. Out now Swimming to Freedom: My Escape from China and the Cultural Revolution by Kent Wong His father was a Chinese official, but when the Cultural Revolution hit, Kent Wong and his siblings were separated into different villages. Eventually, heâd join an underground movement and become one of a half million who fled to Hong Kong via an open water swim that in some spots stretched six miles. His trip ultimately took him to Seattle. He recalls that journey in clear, direct prose in this memoir. You can read an excerpt here.
14:51 In 1833, Charles Darwin was astonished by an animal he met in the Falkland Islands: handsome, social, and oddly crow-like falcons that were "tame and inquisitive . . . quarrelsome and passionate," and so insatiably curious that they stole hats, compasses, and other valuables from the crew of the Beagle. Darwin wondered why these birds were confined to remote islands at the tip of South America, sensing a larger story, but he set this mystery aside and never returned to it. Almost two hundred years later, Jonathan Meiburg takes up this chase. He takes us through South America, from the fog-bound coasts of Tierra del Fuego to the tropical forests of Guyana, in search of these birds: striated caracaras, which still exist, though they're very rare.
Award-winning West Seattle author Lyanda Lynn Haupt has specialized in a subject close to our heart – the intertwining of wildlife and human life, even in the city. We first spoke with her back in 2009, after her third book, “ Crow Planet,” was published. Four years later, “ The Urban Bestiary” was published; “ Mozart’s Starling” followed in 2017; and now, after another four-year interval, tomorrow is the official publication date for “ Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit.” On her website, Haupt describes it as “a book about interconnection, healing, and creating a life of reciprocity with all beings,” and notes that she finished it after the onset of the pandemic. No reading or signing events planned on the peninsula so far (here’s one online), but she tells WSB there’s an incentive for you to buy her book through one of West Seattle’s independent bookstores: “I am happy to personalize books for people through Pegasus and Paper Boat.” Three of Haupt’s previous books have won major awards, including two
“Crow Planet,” it’s not just about crows. Coyotes are in there too, she says, as are many of the other wild things who are mixing it up with us mere humans, in West Seattle and elsewhere. Chatting with Lyanda in the garden behind the 1920s-vintage home she shares with her husband and daughter, you might spot some of the wildness – a hummingbird hovering over a hedge, pondering whether to investigate the small bouquet of salvia that the author placed in a glass as a sort of feeder. (She wrote about the makeshift feeder last weekend on her website “The Tangled Nest: Cultivating an Urban-Earthen Household.”) Or you might hear her stories, like the one about the raccoon that woke her up during a backyard family campout: