Book Review: Looking Up

Looking Up: A Birder’s Guide to Hope through Grief by Courtney Ellis (InterVarsity Press, 2024).

Courtney Ellis is one of the very best people to follow on Twitter.* Her love of birds is so infectious that, if you weren’t interested in birds before knowing her, you will be before long. Like many of us, she first developed an interest in birds while stuck at home during the pandemic, but since those days she’s managed to learn far more about them than most of us ever will. Her sheer delight in all kinds of birds, with all their bewitching traits and quirks, is irresistible.

Now, I’m glad to report, she’s channeled that bird love into a marvelous new book. Looking Up is not just a bird book (although just a bird book from such an enthusiast would still have been great); as its subtitle indicates, it weaves together observations on birds with a story of deep loss.

As Courtney recounts in the book, when she got the news that her grandfather was terminally ill, it was terrible news at a terrible time. Holy Week was just beginning, and as Courtney co-pastors a church in California with her husband, Daryl, it was like being called away during “final exams week.” She felt called to drop everything and rush to her grandfather even as she felt the need to stay and carry her share of the load.

And, because of who she is and what she loves, this difficult memory prompts a meditation on mockingbirds and their shamelessly willful ways.

The book continues in the same vein, with recollections of that painful, precious time with her hospitalized grandfather intertwined with musings on different birds, from hummingbirds to vultures. Rather than giving us a straightforward back-and-forth between a memory of her grandfather and a lesson from birding, the book meanders, moving around in time, incorporating family memories and bird facts and ideas both spiritual and earthy. It’s an unusual format, and an engrossing one.

Tying it all together, Courtney writes, “Birding … teaches me to pay attention, and attention, I think, is at the very heart of what it means to be a person. What it means to extend and receive love. The more I fall in love with birds, the more I grow to love the whole of creation, standing in awe of the one who spun it all into being.”

But just like family life, the world of birds is not all wonder and bliss, and this book is unflinchingly honest about that. Towards the end of the story, the songbird that sings her awake on Palm Sunday morning becomes lunch for a hawk just hours later, right in front of Courtney’s fascinated sons and horrified daughter.

This is an aspect of birding I really struggle with, myself (as I’ve mentioned here before). Knowing that the blue jay I’m feeding right now may go eat some other bird’s eggs in a little while, or seeing one of the local crows leave frog pieces in our birdbath, can unsettle my mind and heart, to say nothing of my stomach. Courtney is more accepting than I am, or maybe just more mature, perhaps through spending so much time in nature, perhaps because of a ministry in which she has done so much for dying human beings.

But she too feels the pain of it. “Creation sings and groans, both together,” she reflects, as we see in both the death of a bird and the death of a beloved grandfather. Yet we are called to bear witness, to keep paying attention through the beauty and the ugliness—to hold on to hope that, as Courtney’s husband preaches on Easter Sunday, “death is swallowed up in victory.” This book taught me something about how to go on doing that, and I’m grateful.

*I refuse to refer to Twitter as “X” unless forced to. For one thing, X is a ridiculous name, and for another, a name like Twitter fits much better in a discussion of birds.

(Cover image copyright InterVarsity Press.)

Book Links:

Looking Up on Amazon
Looking Up on Bookshop

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I’m back on “The Commentarians” podcast, talking about The Godfather with Joe Zaragoza. This is one of the movies I’m writing about in my upcoming book, so tune in for a sort of sneak preview of that chapter!