The running sky

Tim Dee

Storm petrels fly from a midnight sea in June to their nesting holes in a two-thousand-year-old stone tower; a million starlings gather to roost from all points across a freezing winter sky; migrant redstarts, only weeks out of their nest, set off over alien seas on their way to Africa; a pair of airborne swifts lie together for an instant as they mate hundreds of feet up in the sky. "The Running Sky" records a lifetime of looking at birds. There have been many books on the birdwatcher's awkward obsession, but there has been nothing until this that so brilliantly restores us to the primacy of looking, the thrill of watching and thinking about the flying wild creatures that share our planet. Tim Dee writes about what he has seen in a language we have never read before but will recognise as accurate and familiar, with insights new-minted yet immediately understood, in prose that is at...