strange bird

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strange bird (plural strange birds)

1. An unusual person, especially one with an idiosyncratic personality or peculiar behavioral characteristics.
   • 1987 June 14, Karen Stabiner, “Putting her Heart through the Hoop”, in New York Times, retrieved 29 July 2010:

     Jena Janovy is a strange bird—a college basketball player who is a) female and b) short (5 feet 3 inches) and, perhaps oddest of all, lets neither of those things dampen her rabid enthusiasm for the game.

   • 1992, Kaye Gibbons, “My Mother, Literature, and a Life Split Neatly into Two Halves”, in Janet Sternburg, editor, The Writer on Her Work, volume 2, →ISBN, page 56:

     I never saw him, but Jackie Langley told me Kerouac was a strange bird, stayed drunk, talked crazy, brooded.

   • 2003, Donald E. Westlake, Put a Lid on It, →ISBN, page 57:

     "You're a strange bird, Meehan," Leroy told him. "When you find out whose house you're in, call me back."

   • 2004, Tony K. Stewart, Fabulous Females and Peerless Pīrs: Tales of mad adventure in old Bengal, Oxford, →ISBN, page 67:

     In this land, too, there dwelled a young man who was a fowler, but a bit of a strange bird he was, for he only captured his birds, preferring not to slaughter them.

• misfit, oddball, odd duck, odd one out, queer fish, odd bird, queer duck; see also Thesaurus:strange person

• rare bird