Customer Reviews

A Year on the Wing: Four Seasons in a Life with Birds

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This is one of the most beautifully written books I've read in years. I hesitate to call it nature writing since the author is clearly uncomfortable with that label but it celebrates the wonders of nature, in the forms of the birds he's been observing since his childhood. The chapters are organized by months and each month has a theme, for instance, migration or death. Dee moves back and forth in time, sharing experiences across a lifetime of watching birds, and includes references to literature about birds, from the well-known Romantic poets to eccentric, obsessive birders (is that simply redundant?). Dee is obviously an obsessive, one with an eye for accurate observation and a soaring gift with words.

I thought the book would be a diary of bird sightings -- and maybe it was. But the prose is simply unreadable. Pick up any paragraph and the eyes glaze after a few lines: "Migration cannot but seem a mystery. There have been decades of studies from Fair Isle and elsewhere: ringing and radar, tracking and tagging; robins kept in cages flooded with artificial sunshine; pigeons fitted with magnetic skullcaps and opaque contact lenses; Manx shearwaters transported from their nesting burrows in west Wales and tossed back into the air outside St. Mark's in Venice to see if they can make it home." Typical of writing.