The Rarest Bird in the World: The Search for the Nechisar Nightjar

I very much wanted to enjoy this book, which is just the sort I usually love, but this over-written, florid prose did nothing for me, and there's far more tangent than there is actual story of the quest for this rare bird. Skippable, sadly.

This book had so many aspects that I love to read: travel, adventure, nature, Ethiopia, discovery, birds. And because of those I enjoyed the book. Like other reviewers, the descriptions were over-flowery for my tastes, but it didn't detract too much from the book and I still enjoyed the story. There is sort of an unnatural shift from the narration to backstory and side stories about other rare birds, the history of their discoveries and their current status. I appreciated the information and it led to many happy hours googling for more information about those species, but I think the narration would have flowed better if formatted differently or with some sort of transition.

Pet peeve: the original printing of this book had a clever show more painting of the Nechisar Nightjar on the cover. This is the bird at the center of the story. The cover on the book I purchased (and the one shown on goodreads) has an outline of a bird that is a generic perching bird, nothing like a nightjar. It bothers me that someone who probably knows nothing about birds made the decision to produce a more appealing cover, but one that is at odds with the content of the book. It would be like having a book about a rare giraffe and putting an outline of a donkey on the cover. Uhhh... yeah that's also a mammal and an ungulate, but it's all wrong. show less

In 1990, a group of scientists found a bird's wing - all that was left of the road-kill on a dusty smugglers’ road in Ethiopia. The bird to which it belonged was unknown to science, deduced to be a type of nightjar never before seen in the wild. It was given name Caprimulgus solala or Nechisar Nightjar - the rare nightjar with “only one wing.” In 2009, Vernon R. L. Head and three other birdwatchers flew to Ethiopia on an expedition to find a live specimen of the Nechisar Nightjar.

I read the first few paragraphs... and was horrified. But, I decided not to be a curmudgeon old Shoebill Stork and just go with the flow - be the duck on the river and not the rock. Stash the mental red pen under a rock. In the end, the writing style grew show more on me, and I enjoyed the book more than I thought I would. I learned new things, not to mention a different way of looking at things too.

This is not the usual writing style used for natural history/ travel adventure/memoir type nonfiction books. It reads like literary fiction. The writing is lyrical, sentimental, fanciful, florid, opulent, and lush... and sometimes dreamlike. Rife with similes and metaphors - sometimes baffling, occasionally abused, but other times beautiful - the writing is evocative and alluring, whether describing the birds, the landscape, or the author's musings on specific subjects.

Almost nothing was known about the "rarest bird in the world" so any narrative dealing with just the search for this bird would have covered no more than a handful of notebook pages. The search for the Nechisar Nightjar is braided with many tangents, sometimes obscure but related, of the author's birding adventures, stories of friendships and camaraderie, bird watching, the wild places he has seen, meditations on nature and biology, other birds, the human urge to label things, conservation, extinction, the interaction between humans and wild spaces. The author's passion for birding is evident. Interesting, evocative and worthwhile - even with the most purplish purple prose imaginable.

Note: This is a very short book that could really have used photos/illustrations of the places and birds mentioned in the text. I had to keep looking them up on the internet, which is inconvenient at 2am when in bed.

UPDATE: Solving the Mystery of the Nechisar Nightjar
Bird specifications: https://alchetron.com/Nechisar-nightjar show less