An Eye for Birds

The author contracted TB as a ten-year-old and was sent to an isolated sanatorium, where he developed a love of birdwatching. He shared his passion with three schoolmates and spent part of their summer on Bardsey, a remote island off North Wales. The book reflects on the author's journey through those early formative teenage years, where birdwatching sat easily in his life alongside football, girls, radical politics, and rock bands. Each chapter traces the boy's expanding world of nature and then, in later life, he reflects on those times. The author's passion for nature has stayed with him throughout his life, and he explores how views are formed and become a base reference framework to work out his personal ethics and morality.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 176 pages
Publication date: 30 November 2021
Publisher: Whittles Publishing

As a ten-year-old, the author contracted tuberculosis and was sent to an isolated sanatorium, deep in the Cheshire countryside. There he was bedridden for six months. On fine days, nurses would push the young patients, in their beds, out onto a large veranda, and it was there that his love of birdwatching developed. On leaving the hospital, he shared his passion with three schoolmates, and over the next five years, this small band of birders explored wildlife locations on and nearby the Wirral. Their travels and love of nature were epitomized when, at the age of 16, they spent part of their summer on Bardsey, a remote island off the north Wales coast, as part of a small, professional team of naturalists.

As a young birdwatcher, the author was fascinated by the natural world and began to grasp the basics of the science of evolution. This is a rites of passage story of one lad's journey through those early formative teenage years from 1957 to 1962, when birdwatching sat easily in his life alongside football, girls, radical politics, and rock bands. Each chapter traces the boy's expanding world of nature, and then, in later life, he reflects on those times. A passion for nature has stayed with him throughout his life, and as an adult, he explores the way views are formed and become a base reference framework to work out his personal ethics and morality. On revisiting all his old haunts, each visit triggers further questions, reflections, and musings. How does nature manage, over all those years, to continue to inspire and stimulate him? What does it mean to be part of nature? How does nature manage to heal?

An Eye for Birds is a series of reflections of an individual, trained in the sciences, revisiting his teenage wildlife haunts and looking back to those times with a mature perspective and sentiment that a.

Weight: 362g
Dimension: 138 x 215 x 15 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781849954952