A good book for the cold winter nights ahead…

I just finished reading “A Year on the Wing, Four Seasons in a Life with Birds,” by Tim Dee, and I really enjoyed it. Much of the book takes place in England, which is what first appealed to me. Since starting my blog last January and making friends with many of the British bird bloggers, I’ve learned so much about the European birds. This book helped me reinforce that knowledge. Written in a beautiful, poetic style, you will want to linger over the pages—not speed through them. “A Year on the Wing” is a perfect book to get you through the gray days of January. Travel along with the author as he follows the birds through the year with a special concentration on migration. One of my favorite paragraphs in the book illustrates how devoted the author is to the birds and how sensitive he is to their lives, in particular, to their seasonal journeys:

"What must it be like to be so sensitive to the magnetism of the earth that you are able to taste the iron in the air; to be drawn up into that air as if evaporated; to feel the inching creep of longer nights pushing you away from what you know toward what you don’t? What must it be like to hatch from an egg and look up from a nest and know the stars already? As if your paper-thin skull were a planetarium, along with the smooth curve of your late abandoned eggshell and the cup or your nest, too, as if the skies and the stars had pressed their map into everything there is of you."