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A Year on the Wing: Four Seasons in a Life with Birds
A Year on the Wing Four Seasons in a Life with Birds Author:Tim Dee A beautiful chronicle of a year of watching birds, from an exciting new literary voice. — Birds--those "upgiven ghosts" who shape our skies--and their many styles of flying have inspired us for centuries. Tim Dee became entralled with birds as a young boy, and their allure has informed how he perceives time as well as how he sees the wo... more »rld and his place in it. Compelling and poetic, A Year on the Wing is a month-by-month account of following these magnificent creatures, on land, at sea, and in the air, over the course of one "dew-dipped year." A memoir of the author's life as well of the birds' migrations, the book draws on memories of forty years of observing birds as Dee explores the ideas and feelings that birds awaken in their flying, breeding and dying.
With a poet's marvelous commingling of nature and language, Dee finds meaning and a fascinating beauty in the quiver of a redstart's tail, elegizes the thrilling skydiving scoop of the once-endangered, now resurgent peregrine falcon, and reflects on the nocturnal restlessness of migrant woodcocks that is suggestive of how nature encodes us all.
A Year on the Wing brings us as close as possible to birds, as we seek to understand the unique connection between us and them as well as our separation from them and, by extension, our estrangement from all nature. Watching birds instills a renewed sense of wonder, getting us airborne and expanding our horizons. This vicarious liftoff does us good in a way hard to define but incontestably felt. It also makes us ever aware of our place on the ground. Dee homes in on those moments when the gap narrows between humans and birds, when birds' freedom gives us our own, making our lives more vibrant and alive.« less