This site is not associated with Lyanda Lynn Haupt or her book The Urban Bestiary: Encountering The Everyday Wild (Little, Brown Spark, 2013), but I want to give a special shoutout to her. Lyanda’s writing is wonderful and knowledgeable. She is particularly expert about birds. In fact, one of her other books, Mozart’s Starling (Little, Brown Spark, 2017) is my favourite of her books I have read so far. It is a heartwarming and charming account of how she saved and adopted a female starling, which she named Carmen, to better understand what it might have been like for Mozart to live with such an intelligent and musically adept creature. Haupt does delve into researching Mozart and even goes so far as to visit his home (turned into an odd museum), and gently informs the reader of various facts and histories about the bird, but the book’s charm is in her everyday life with Carmen. I think the next book of Haupt’s that I will read will likely be Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from The Urban Wilderness (Little, Brown Spark, 2011). When I do, I’ll let you know about it!