ON LIFE WITH BIRDS

Tim Dee Running Sky Birds took possession of Tim Dee's imagination at an early age. As a three-year-old he saw a blue-backed swallow flit out of the summer light to its nest in a dark garden shed and his obsession was born. Since then he has watched more than 40 swallow springs and autumns and is unable to remember a birdless day.

In this poetic memoir he traces a year of birds, from one summer to the next. He mines stories from his lifetime of encounters with them: in their nests, in the palms of his hands, flying free, dead in collections and in the literature of Pliny, Bede, Keats, Clare and Joyce.

He begins in Shetland, where terns and blackbirds keep up their mix of scream and serenade, harangue and consolation and gannets mutter their homely, rubbery conversation. From there he takes the reader to the huge square yawn of the Wash, to the Avon Gorge at Bristol and farther afield to California and Zambia.
Adding depth to his travels is his bubbling passion for birds. Millions of oily starlings gather to roost from a freezing winter sky. Redstarts, only weeks old, set off on their thousands of miles to Africa. A peregrine bolts overhead and a tawny owl flies in its brown field of gathered quiet.

"The Running Sky" is more than a record of a life with birds. It is an exploration of looking and seeing, of spotting, in the author's words, the ways in which nature has written itself into the world. It notes how the autumn departures and spring arrivals of migrating birds make a timetable in our lives, and how birds make wherever they happen to be their home. The defining condition of bird-watching, says the author, is to feel as though you have simultaneously been shown the bird yet kept yourself from it.

What makes this book, Mr Dee's first, stand out from other birdwatching narratives is his writing, which soars likes the birds and birdsong he describes. The call of the plover is a plaintive bruised blues made from just one bent note, that of the blackcap hot chocolate being poured from an old silver jug. An island huddles under a hubbub of wind and rain and puffin coo and gannet vibrato. Throughout is the author's joy over how much his life has been enriched by the flying wild creatures that share his world yet still make it their own.

"The Running Sky: A Birdwatching Life" (Jonathan Cape), by Tim Dee, out now

~ HELENA DOUGLAS