Helen Macdonald

From the New York Times bestselling author of H is for Hawk and winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction, comes a transcendent collection of essays about the human relationship to the natural world. Animals don't exist in order to teach us things, but that is what they have always done, and most of what they teach us is what we think we know about ourselves. In Vesper Flights, Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best loved essays, along with new pieces on topics ranging from nostalgia for a vanishing countryside to the tribulations of farming ostriches to her own private vespers while trying to fall asleep. Meditating on notions of captivity and freedom, immigration and flight, Helen invites us into her most intimate experiences: observing the massive migration of songbirds from the top of the Empire State Building, watching tens of thousands of cranes in Hungary, seeking the last golden orioles in Suffolk's poplar forests. She writes with heart-tugging clarity about wild boar, swifts, mushroom hunting, migraines, the strangeness of birds' nests, and the unexpected guidance and comfort we find when watching wildlife. By one of this century's most important and insightful nature writers, Vesper Flights is a captivating and foundational book about observation, fascination, time, memory, love and loss and how we make sense of the world around us.

Vesper Flights

sarah

So many of our stories about nature are about testing ourselves against it... But this was nothing like that at all. It was a child's way of looking at nature: one seeking intimacy and companionship. When I learned the names of these creatures from field guides it was because I needed to know them the same way I had to know the names of my classmates at school. Their diverse lives expanded what I considered as home way beyond the walls of my house. They made the natural world seem a place of complex and beautiful safety. They felt like family.

And while my feet are treading on last year’s leaves, those of next spring are already furled in buds on the tips of twigs around and above me.

A few miles beneath me was molten rock, a few miles above limitless dust and vacancy, and there I'd lie with the warm blanket of the troposphere over me and red cotton duvet cover too, and the smell of tonight's dinner lingering upstairs, and downstairs the sound of my mother busy at her typewriter… No matter how tightly the day’s bad things had gripped me, there was so much up there above me, so much below.

Increasingly knowing your surroundings, recognising the species of animals and plants around you, means opening yourself to constant grief. 

reminds me of my sweet central park pigeon… 

Such encounters with pigeons as ephemerally dissolving people’s solitude…And that is why many of us feed animals – not merely because it's satisfying to feel we have helped them, but because it surrounds us with creatures that know us, are able to forge bonds with us, have come to regard us as part of their world. 

We use animals as ideas to amplify and enlarge aspects of ourselves, turning them into simple, safe harbours for things we feel and cannot express. None of us see animals clearly. They’re too full of the stories we’ve given them…The more I've learned about animals the more I've come to think there might not be only one right way to express care, to feel allegiance, a love for place, a way of moving through the world.

When I looked at the rook and the rook looked at me, I became a feature of its world as much as it became a feature of mine. Our separate lives coincided, and all my self-absorbed anxiety vanished in that one fugitive moment, when a bird in the sky on its way somewhere else sent a glance across the divide and stitched me back into a world where both of us have equal billing.

Vesper Flights quotes

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