The Nature of Things

I would have bought the book for its cover alone, a picture of a swift in flight. I have a lifelong love of swifts, those magical birds that live their lives entirely on the wing, except for when they are nesting and brooding eggs or chicks. They eat, drink, mate, and even sleep in the air. They have tiny little feet that are too weak for perching but are able to cling to the vertical side of a chimney or similar opening and in such places, they build their nests and rear their young until they too are ready to take to the air. Macdonald's swift is the Common Swift of Europe. On this continent, we have the Chimney Swift which nests in my part of the world, and the Vaux's Swift of western states. There are slight differences between them but all three live their lives in the air. Macdonald's new book, a collection of essays about nature and our relationship to it, includes an appreciation of the swift in the essay which gives the book its title, "Vesper Flights."  ...

H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald My rating: 5 of 5 stars Helen Macdonald, as she tells it in H Is for Hawk , was an awkward, unlovely, unpopular child. But though her life in the outside world may not have been so auspicious, she had a rich interior life that allowed her to escape from all that. She had an obsession: birds. She was fascinated by birds in general, but the ones which held the strongest attraction for her were the raptors, the magnificent killing machines of the avian world. She read everything she could find about the birds and about humans working with those magnificent killing machines and training them in the sport of falconry. Her most passionate desire was to be a falconer when she grew up. Helen, unlike many of us, had parents who did not discourage her obsession. They accepted it as normal and encouraged her in it. Her father, a professional news photographer, took her into the fields and woods to observe birds and to look for raptors. He taught her to focus as t...