“The Running Sky: A Birdwatching Life” by Tim Dee : 20 July 2011

“The Running Sky: A Birdwatching Life” by Tim Dee : 20 July 2011

“The Running Sky” is one of those bird books that belongs to the “emotional” or “aesthetic” tradition of natural history writings. In twelve chapters, one for each month of the year starting in June, Dee relates stories from a lifetime of birding. In his own words “it follows a single year of (birds) from one summer to the next; it begins with nests and eggs and chicks on the sea cliffs of Shetland, and it ends, a year later with nests, eggs and chicks in the holes of an oak wood on Exmoor.” A mixture of acute observation of both people and birds, this book relates a selection of experiences from over 40 years of birding.

In keeping with a tradition with this kind of writing not only are there joyful experiences recounted but there are also some deeply black moments as when he recalls his reactions as a child doing his paper round and hoping to see Peregrines as he cycled over Clifton Suspension Bridge but instead witnessing the suicide of a young man who jumped off the bridge just as he passed him on his bicycle. Dee writes :

 My thoughts closed in on the moment when the energy of his push from the railings equalled the force of gravity and the air’s collusion with it and his body felt weightless in space. There would have been a moment like that – that was what it felt like when I used to jump from the swing in our old back garden. I loved that feeling. For a fraction of a second you have the tiniest intimation of flight.

This is, of course, his adult response to the event but his childhood experience is later mediated by his knowledge of, and fascination with, birds. This is perhaps one of the darker experiences recounted in the book and there are others more heartwarming but they all share this in common that Dee uses them to poetically explain the relationship between humans and birds and he does this by simultaneously recounting a year in the life of birds and a lifetime of observing and experiencing them from Shetland to Zambia and from Bristol to the Sahara.

I found it a very moving and interesting book and a change from the strictly ethological approach. It occupies the territory where poetic sensibility and scientific understanding meet to produce the human experience of being among birds.

“The Running Sky: A Birdwatching Life” by Tim Dee, Vintage (3 Jun 2010), Paperback : 272 pages, ISBN-10:0099516497, ISBN-13: 978-0099516491