Description

Shortlisted for the 2023 Highland Book Prize

Joyful and mindful a powerful argument for being still and listening Sunday Times

A book about birds birdsong and the countryside they inhabit 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 grannys 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 nightjars 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 hearsThe 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 skylarks song Sometimes he hears a lot and sees little shearwaters in the pitch dark sometimes he sees a lot but hears little blackthroated 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