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A review by realityczar
The Seabird's Cry: The Lives and Loves of the Planet's Great Ocean Voyagers by Adam Nicolson
5.0
Full disclosure, I love birds. And I discovered my love of birds during a visit to a colony of Atlantic puffins. Undoubtedly, some of my significant affection for this book is tied up in my affection for the animals it describes, and for the wild, deserted (of humans, anyway) cliffs where they visit shore.
Adam Nicolson clearly loves these birds as well. He discovered his love for them as a youth on a small group of Hebridean islands that he now--lucky man--owns. His book dedicates a chapter apiece to ten of his favorite species, following them around the North Atlantic and the Southern Ocean as he explores their lives and habits, and uncovers the history of human knowledge of the various birds. He often leans on depictions by others to characterize the birds--Melville and Coleridge for the albatross, for instance, or Milton on the cormorant--but his own prose stands up robustly to the great poets. He says of my beloved puffins for example, that they are
In addition to fine writing from many sources, Nicolson incorporates all the science you could hope for. The technological advances of the last few decades have enabled humans to discover the seaborne and airborne lives of birds who were previously only known from the earthbound perspective of their flightless chroniclers. Scientists now track birds thousands of mile across the oceans and hundreds of feet below their surfaces. Nicolson argues persuasively that we underestimate the individual intelligence and personalities of his subjects, and provides a lens through which to get a hint of how the birds experience the world. He also provides a chapter that focuses on the science of a warming, plastic-infested planet and how we humans are remaking--indeed, have remade--the world the birds experience, often but not always to their detriment.
The book is unflinching and there are moments that broke my little bird-loving heart: "Nature, red in tooth and claw," after all. Nicolson respects the good and bad of the birds, and presents them both movingly. He also clearly remains hopeful and effectively shares that hope with his reader. In the end, The Seabird's Cry leaves its reader a little closer to these beautiful, awful, confounding occupants of sky, sea, and shore, and much the better for that new proximity.
Adam Nicolson clearly loves these birds as well. He discovered his love for them as a youth on a small group of Hebridean islands that he now--lucky man--owns. His book dedicates a chapter apiece to ten of his favorite species, following them around the North Atlantic and the Southern Ocean as he explores their lives and habits, and uncovers the history of human knowledge of the various birds. He often leans on depictions by others to characterize the birds--Melville and Coleridge for the albatross, for instance, or Milton on the cormorant--but his own prose stands up robustly to the great poets. He says of my beloved puffins for example, that they are
not clowns but beauties, Ice Age survivors, scholar-gypsies of the Atlantic, their minds on an everlasting swing between island and sea, burrow and voyage, parent and child, the oscillating nomad-masters of an unpacific ocean.
In addition to fine writing from many sources, Nicolson incorporates all the science you could hope for. The technological advances of the last few decades have enabled humans to discover the seaborne and airborne lives of birds who were previously only known from the earthbound perspective of their flightless chroniclers. Scientists now track birds thousands of mile across the oceans and hundreds of feet below their surfaces. Nicolson argues persuasively that we underestimate the individual intelligence and personalities of his subjects, and provides a lens through which to get a hint of how the birds experience the world. He also provides a chapter that focuses on the science of a warming, plastic-infested planet and how we humans are remaking--indeed, have remade--the world the birds experience, often but not always to their detriment.
The book is unflinching and there are moments that broke my little bird-loving heart: "Nature, red in tooth and claw," after all. Nicolson respects the good and bad of the birds, and presents them both movingly. He also clearly remains hopeful and effectively shares that hope with his reader. In the end, The Seabird's Cry leaves its reader a little closer to these beautiful, awful, confounding occupants of sky, sea, and shore, and much the better for that new proximity.