The Running Sky (The Birds and the Bees)
A Bird-Watching Life
Published on 5. May 2016
Book
Paperback/Softback
304 pages
978-1-78487-114-7 (ISBN)
Description
An extraordinary, inspiring book about a lifetime of observing birds, already acclaimed as a classic.
Beginning in summer with clouds of breeding seabirds in Shetland and ending with nightjars like giant moths in the heart of England, Tim Dee maps his encounters with birds over four decades of tracking them around the world. He tells of familiar but near-global birds like sparrows, starlings and ravens, and exotic species, like electrically coloured hummingbirds in California and bee-eaters in Africa. Dee restores us to the primacy of looking, and takes us outside, again and again, to marvel at what is flying above us.
Beginning in summer with clouds of breeding seabirds in Shetland and ending with nightjars like giant moths in the heart of England, Tim Dee maps his encounters with birds over four decades of tracking them around the world. He tells of familiar but near-global birds like sparrows, starlings and ravens, and exotic species, like electrically coloured hummingbirds in California and bee-eaters in Africa. Dee restores us to the primacy of looking, and takes us outside, again and again, to marvel at what is flying above us.
Reviews / Votes
The Running Sky has the makings of a classic. It's beautifully written, extraordinarily vigilant, and very moving. Most remarkable of all, it manages to give a sense of the bird world as being something which embraces and contains our own - which means that, 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 * Lyrical...sure to become a genuine addition to the literature of birds * Daily Express * What makes his book wonderful is his passion... He captures the thrill and puzzlement of watching birds as I have never previously seen it captured * Sunday Herald * 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 *More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Vintage Publishing
Dimensions
Height: 178 mm
Width: 129 mm
Thickness: 18 mm
Weight
230 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-78487-114-7 (9781784871147)
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
Person
Tim Dee has been a birdwatcher all his life. His first book, The Running Sky (2009), described his first five birdwatching decades. In the same year he collaborated with the poet Simon Armitage on the anthology The Poetry of Birds. Since then he has written and edited several critically acclaimed books: Four Fields (2013), a study of modern pastoral, which was shortlisted for the 2014 Ondaatje Prize; Ground Work (as editor, 2017), a collection of new commissioned writing on place by contemporary writers; and most recently, Landfill (2018), a modern nature-junk monograph on gulls and rubbish. He left the BBC in 2018 having worked as a radio producer for nearly thirty years. He lives in three places: in a flat in inner-city Bristol, in a cottage on the edge of the Cambridgeshire Fens, and in the last-but-one house from the south western tip of Africa, at the Cape of Good Hope.