Wild Air: In Search of Birdsong

(Hardback)

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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 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 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 skylarks 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.

Reviews

Praise for James Macdonald Lockhart

Lockhart's prose is so intimate, urgent, and visceral as to make his darkly resonant ruminations almost unfailingly gripping Independent

[Lockharts] exquisite, poetic language is a sensuous delight Daily Mail

Outstanding he captures that wild spirit without ever making it feel captive Sunday Times

Lockhart is stepping towards the distinguished company of the great modern literary books on birds of prey Country Life

Author Bio

James Macdonald Lockhart is an associate editor of, and regular contributor to, Archipelago Magazine, and a literary agent at Antony Harwood Limited.