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Wild Air (Hardcover)
James Macdonald Lockhart
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R400
Discovery Miles 4 000
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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A book about birdsong, from the critically acclaimed author of
Raptor. In Wild Air, James Macdonald Lockhart sets out to write
about a series of birds as though he has his granny's role of
listening to birds' songs and calls and relaying what she heard to
her aged and by then quite deaf father - the famous naturalist
Seton Gordon. From a nightjar's strange churring song on a heath in
the south of England, to a lapwing displaying over the machair in
the Outer Hebrides, he writes about eight different birds who he
has spent most time with, returned to most often and relays what he
hears. The eight species are all representative of a different
habitat. Nightjars on a lowland heath; shearwaters on a mountain
overlooking the sea; dippers on a river; skylarks in farmland;
ravens in woodland; divers on a loch; lapwings on the coast; and
nightingales in dense scrub. Not all of the birds are songbirds in
the traditional sense, though each possesses its own distinctive
music. That music can vary from the strange, as in the weird
gurgling sound a shearwater makes inside its burrow, to the joyous
exuberance of the skylark's song. Sometimes, he hears a lot, and
sees little (shearwaters in the pitch dark); sometimes he sees a
lot, but hears little (black-throated divers on their loch). But in
every case the sounds the birds make become an introduction to
their lives - an audible introduction to the birds and the places
they are found.
Winner of The Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for
Non-Fiction in 2011 and the Authors' Foundation Roger Deakin Award
in 2011 A stunning debut in the tradition of Robert Macfarlane and
Helen Macdonald Of all the birds of the British Isles, the raptor
reigns supreme, sparking the imagination like no other. In this
magnificent hymn to these beautiful animals, James Macdonald
Lockhart explores all fifteen breeding birds of prey on these
shores - from the hen harrier swimming over the land in the dregs
of a May gale on Orkney, to the ghostly sparrowhawk displaying in
the fields around his home in Warwickshire. This is a book that
will change how we think of our own skies.
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