The Running Sky records a lifetime of looking at birds. Begining in summer with clouds of breeding seabirds in Shetland and ending with crepuscular nightjars like giant moths in the heart of England, Tim Dee maps his own observations and encounters over four decades of tracking birds across the globe. He tells of near-global birds like sparrows, starlings and ravens, and exotic species, like electrically coloured hummingbirds in California and bee-eaters and broadbills in Africa. In doing so he brilliantly restores us to the primacy of looking, the thrill of watching, and takes us outside, again and again, to stand – with or without binoculars – under the storm of life over our heads, and to marvel once more at what is flying about us.
The Running Sky has the makings of a classic. It's beautifully written, extraordinarily vigilant, and very moving...as we read it, we learn a lot about ourselves as well as the fellow creatures flying through, over and around our own lives -- Andrew Motion Its author has a forensic eye for detail and a gift for poetry...an intimate and erudite account... he is in the front rank of contributors to the literature of natural history * Daily Telegraph * Serious and playful...creates a powerful and intensely poetic paean to what others have called the wonder of birds * Guardian * A beautifully haunting and involving memoir. The writer's passion for birds becomes his way of expressing his whole relationship to landscape and history and family: unsentimental and urgently contemporary -- Tessa Hadley Dee's extraordinary, beautifully written account of a life spent watching birds is a fine addition to the flourishing genre of British nature writing * Sunday Times *
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