I finished BirdCloud and enjoyed it.
To me, it didn't resemble the review posted above. Hardly "shelter porn", the description of building the house is a recurring motif, set among fascinating and deep accounts of both her ancestors and the land itself. I kept thinking of Michener: extensive geology, geneology, surveys of flora and fauna--but with footnotes!
In fact, she reveals little of herself in any direct manner. She doesn't really discuss her writing or her living family. Rather we see her through her interactions in the building of the house, and in her attitudes toward the land, and her understanding of time slipping away. The book seems more about the land than about her. She has said that place and climate determine one's destiny. The land, like her long and curious lineage, is both eternal and ephemeral, brutal and brilliant.
One example is a tall, narrow window she built to frame the view of the tree favored by a pair of bald eagles. In a passage right out of one of her stories, the tree is soon felled by weather, and the eagle window is now useless, an excellent metaphor for her house endeavor, and the futility of trying to wrangle nature.
She does seem reluctantly reliant on her crew for survival, and they are merely two-dimensional. That she loves birds more than people is not surprising in one so reclusive.
Of course it's easy to take phrases or sentences out of context and pronounce them to be precious. However, in context, they sounded perfectly natural. In fact, I found this nonfiction to be more readable than much of her fiction prose.