Vesper flights : new and collected essays

Macdonald, Helen 1970- (author.).

Summary: "In Vesper Flights, Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best loved essays with new pieces on topics ranging from nostalgia for a vanishing countryside to the tribulations of farming ostriches to her own private vespers while trying to fall asleep. Meditating on notions of captivity and freedom, immigration and flight, Helen invites us into her most intimate experiences: observing songbirds from the Empire State Building as they migrate through the Tribute of Light, watching tens of thousands of cranes in Hungary, and seeking the last golden orioles in Suffolk's poplar forests. She writes with heart-tugging clarity about wild boar, swifts, mushroom hunting, migraines, the strangeness of birds' nests, and the unexpected guidance and comfort we find when watching wildlife. By one of this century's most important and insightful nature writers, Vesper Flights is a captivating and foundational book about observation, fascination, time, memory, love and loss and how we make sense of the world around us"--

Record details

ISBN: 9780802128812
ISBN: 0802128815
ISBN: 9780802146694
Physical Description: print
ix, 261 pages ; 22 cm
Edition: First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition.
Publisher: New York, NY : Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, 2020.
Copyright: ©2020

Content descriptions

General Note:

First published in the United Kingdom in 2020 by Jonathan Cape.

Formatted Contents Note:

Nests -- Nothing Like a Pig -- Inspector Calls -- Field Guides -- Tekels Park -- High-Rise -- The Human Flock -- The Student's Tale -- Ants -- Symptomatic -- Sex, Death, Mushrooms -- Winter Woods -- Eclipse -- In Her Orbit -- Hares -- Lost, But Catching Up -- Swan Upping -- Nestboxes -- Deer in the Headlights -- The Falcon and the Tower -- Vesper Flights -- In Spight of Prisons -- Sun Birds and Cashmere Spheres -- The Observatory -- Wicken -- Storm -- Murmurations -- A Cuckoo in the House -- The Arrow-Stork -- Ashes -- A Handful of Corn -- Berries -- Cherry Stones -- Birds, Tabled -- Hiding -- Eulogy -- Rescue -- Goats -- Dispatches from the Valleys -- The Numinous Ordinary -- What Animals Taught Me.