Owl Sense
Published on 8. February 2018
Book
Hardback
352 pages
978-1-78335-074-2 (ISBN)
Description
A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK
Longlisted for the Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize 2018
'A beautiful book; wise and sharp-eared as its subject' - Robert Macfarlane
'Captivating' - The Times
'Achingly beautiful' - Guardian
'Vivid and engaging' - Sunday Times
'Her softness took my breath away. Deadly beauty. She turned her face towards me. There is a narrow area that falls between pleasing and preposterous, and this owl's circular face and bright yellow eyes fitted into it with perfect grace...'
Owls have captivated the human imagination for millennia. We have fixated on this night hunter as predator, messenger, emblem of wisdom or portent of doom. In Owl Sense, Miriam Darlington sets out to tell a new story.
Her fieldwork begins with wild encounters in the British Isles, on the owl walks she takes with her teenage son Benji. From here, Darlington seeks to identify every European species of this charismatic and elusive bird, on a journey that will take her from southern Spain through France, Serbia and Finland, and to the frosted borders of the Arctic.
Along the way, however, Benji succumbs to a mysterious and disabling illness, and her owl quest soon becomes entangled with the search for his cure.
Owl Sense is a book about the wild in nature and in the unpredictable course of our human lives. In her watching and deep listening to owls in the natural world, Darlington cleaves myth from reality and brings the strangeness and magnificence of these creatures to life.
Longlisted for the Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize 2018
'A beautiful book; wise and sharp-eared as its subject' - Robert Macfarlane
'Captivating' - The Times
'Achingly beautiful' - Guardian
'Vivid and engaging' - Sunday Times
'Her softness took my breath away. Deadly beauty. She turned her face towards me. There is a narrow area that falls between pleasing and preposterous, and this owl's circular face and bright yellow eyes fitted into it with perfect grace...'
Owls have captivated the human imagination for millennia. We have fixated on this night hunter as predator, messenger, emblem of wisdom or portent of doom. In Owl Sense, Miriam Darlington sets out to tell a new story.
Her fieldwork begins with wild encounters in the British Isles, on the owl walks she takes with her teenage son Benji. From here, Darlington seeks to identify every European species of this charismatic and elusive bird, on a journey that will take her from southern Spain through France, Serbia and Finland, and to the frosted borders of the Arctic.
Along the way, however, Benji succumbs to a mysterious and disabling illness, and her owl quest soon becomes entangled with the search for his cure.
Owl Sense is a book about the wild in nature and in the unpredictable course of our human lives. In her watching and deep listening to owls in the natural world, Darlington cleaves myth from reality and brings the strangeness and magnificence of these creatures to life.
More details
Edition
Main
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 135 mm
Thickness: 24 mm
Weight
486 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-78335-074-2 (9781783350742)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Miriam Darlington is a poet and author of Otter Country. Reviewers hailed her as a successor to Gavin Maxwell and Henry Williamson, and as a central part of the new nature writing movement. She has a PhD in English from the University of Exeter and a particular interest in the tensions, overlaps and relationships between science, poetry, nature writing and the changing ecology of human-animal relations.