Vesper Flights by Helen MacDonald is a lovely collection of essays of the author's observations of the natural world and her own memories and experiences.
A thoughtful and sensitive meditation on nature well worth reading.

This collection of essays was extremely thought-provoking and showed raw emotion beautifully. I loved that these essays shared what we can learn, what we can do better, and how we should appreciate animals. These essays shared a unique point of view that is informative, but also entertaining.

Vesper Flights is a collection of forty-one essays by naturalist Helen Macdonald. They recount her experiences with birds, other animals, and several natural phenomena. With the author reminiscing about events from her life, the book loosely resembles a memoir. However, the scope of each essay is much more than being mere recollections of her life. They serve as a mirror that reflects her innermost thoughts and emotions. From absolute grief to sheer joy- the essays are dependable records of every shade of emotions present in-between.

The knowledge that could be gathered from this book is multifaceted. The readers can garner interesting, and at times surprising, facts about nature. However, the educative value of the book does not depend solely on these mind-blowing bits of information. It is when the readers immerse themselves into the well-articulated thoughts of the author that they understand there is more to the natural world than meets the eye.

All of us are aware of the almost magical effect nature has on the human mind, providing refuge, solace, and even deep insights at times. The author’s personal experiences are a testament to that. Besides, she frequently highlights how the British people treasure their avifauna and natural history as something that deserves national pride. This is because we tend to view the birds as extensions of ourselves and find them reflecting our desires and unfulfilled wishes. What makes this book more alluring, however, is that Macdonald describes how human ways can influence wildlife, too. This influence has two opposing yet interconnected aspects. We are all too aware of the destructive side as we read about habitat destruction and climate change. On the other hand, it is heart-warming to find that the birds have made human-made artifacts a part of their natural environment and that the conservationist approaches have improved their well-being.

Macdonald’s essays are informative and thought-provoking, to say the least. Reading this book was no easy experience for me, as I found myself taking frequent pauses, musing on her thoughts and statements. This is a book that demands re-readings, with each read unveiling a deeper meaning and evoking obscure emotions. I wholeheartedly recommend this book to the readers who appreciate nature and those who love to reflect on what they have read.

I love it when naturalists are also poets. These essays are thought-provoking and breathtaking in turn. I can't wait to purchase this book for our home.

Thoughtful, inspiring and yet well-grounded in the realities we all live in. This will be an instant bestseller in our shop.
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Call of the wild
Author Helen Macdonald’s Vesper Flights
Michele Harris
Michele.harris@erickson.com

Earlier this year, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology invited birdwatchers from around the world to share their observations on their website, eBird.org, as part of an annual event known as Global Big Day.

This year, the event fell on May 9th–a day when as much as one half of the world’s population was under some type of lockdown order due to the Covid-19 Pandemic. Perhaps that explains why this year’s Global Big Day was such a record-breaker.

Over 50,000, birders reported 2.1 million observations—up a whopping 45 percent from 2019.

Similarly, downloads of the National Audubon Society bird identification app are double what they were last year, and retailers report robust sales of birdwatching necessities—from seeds to feeders to binoculars.

Birdwatchers of every stripe, from novices to experienced ornithologists will surely delight in Helen Macdonald’s new book, Vesper Flights (Grove Press).

Macdonald, a naturalist, poet, and research scholar at the University of Cambridge, landed on the world stage in 2014 with her enormously popular book H is for Hawk, an account of how training a young goshawk named Mabel helped her through a time of grief following the death of her beloved father.

Vesper Flights is a collection of Macdonald’s previously published essays covering everything from songbird migration to wild boars to mushroom hunting. While the subjects are varied, for Macdonald, the book is about one thing.

Early in Vesper Flights, she says, “I choose to think that my subject is love and most specifically love for the glittering world of non-human life around us.”

Aliens on earth

“Swifts are magical in the manner of all things that exist just a little beyond understanding,” says Macdonald. “They still seem to me the closest thing to aliens on Earth.”

Among the fastest birds, swifts are aerodynamic marvels capable of both eating and sleeping while aloft; touching down just long enough to breed.

The average swift travels 200,000 kilometers per year. Over a lifetime, that adds up to two million kilometers or five trips to the moon.

On summer evenings, flocks of swifts gather and “all at once, as if summoned by a call or a bell, they rise higher and higher until they disappear from view. These ascents are called vesper flights.”

The birds rise as high as 8,000 feet, to what’s known as the connective boundary layer, where air currents are dictated by large weather systems rather than the landscape below.

They are there to gage approaching weather patterns. Working as a group, they access atmospheric conditions and observe how those conditions are impacting fellow swifts to determine when the flock should travel and where they should go.

“Swifts are my fable of community,” says Macdonald. “Teaching us about how to make right decisions in the face of oncoming bad weather, in the face of clouds that sit like dark rubble on our own horizon.”

The cuckoo and the spy

Macdonald shares the story of Maxwell Knight. The name may not ring a bell, but his initial—M—surely will. A British intelligence officer in charge of MI5 counter-subversion on home ground during WWII, Knight is believed to be the real-life model of the enduring character “M” in the James Bond novels.

(Diehard Bond fans may disagree on this count. There were a handful of military men who served with author Ian Fleming who could have inspired the character. However, Knight was known for signing his memos “M.”)

After a distinguished military career, Knight became a popular BBC radio naturalist, offering advice on a wide variety of nature topics but animals, especially birds, were his passion.

At various times, Knight shared his home with a menagerie of beasts including exotic birds, a baboon, a black bear cub, and a cuckoo bird.

While it may seem an unlikely trajectory to go from spymaster to animal handler, Macdonald sees it as a natural progression of sorts saying, “Knight wrote of the correct relationship between animal and handler in almost exactly the same terms he’d used to describe the correct relationship between agent-runner and agent.”

Great extinction

Sadly, as the number of birdwatchers is climbing, the number of birds is rapidly declining. Since 1970, the world has lost three billion birds.

As Macdonald points out, we are living through the world’s sixth great extinction, “one caused by us.”

“We need hard science to establish the rate and scale of these declines, to work out why it is occurring and what mitigation strategies can be brought into play,” she says. “But we need literature too; we need to communicate what the losses mean.”

She points to the plight of the wood warbler, a small brightly colored bird, fast disappearing from British forests. “It is one thing to show the statistical facts about a species decline,” she writes. “It is another thing to communicate to people what wood warblers are and what that loss means, when your experience of a wood that is made of light and leaves and song becomes something less complex, less magical, just less, once the warblers have gone.”

Very nice and interesting read. Ms Macdonald describes in the preface that she hopes that this book will be like a Cabinet of Curiosities, or rather Wonders, and she achieved this purpose perfectly. It contains many short pieces on various subjects related to nature, so it's best to read in parts, because this constant changing subject can be a little confusing.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the advance copy of this book.

trigger warning
<spoiler> animal cruelty, being a prisoner of war, grief, trauma </spoiler>

In these essays, naturalist Helen Macdonald recounts numerous meetings with animals - and other people who meet animals. In her calm, enthusiastic prose, we accompany her to swan upping, where british swans are counted, ringed and health-checked. We are taken to bird fairs, into hideouts.
But not only birds are mentioned, there is an essay about goats, one about deer - and deer-car accidents.

I learned quite a bit about animals in general, and british birds and Helen Macdonal in particular, like that she grew up in a sort of commune since it was cheap and that it was a child's paradise that made her a naturalist.

There are beautiful pictures. Like one day, she climbed the empire state building to meet there with a fellow bird enthusiast and take a look at migrating birds. There are hilarious scenes, sad scenes.
This is the third book by Helen Macdonald I read, the first in English, and I am sure I want to read more. Not only do I like her writings, but also how she thinks about things and animals and where she puts her focus in her tales. Most often I am happy with reading books, but this is a rare instance in which I'd like to meet the author one day, and swap favourite animal stories.

Also, this book made me think about myself, and where I live. In the middle of a city so bright that it's impossible to see the stars in cloudfree nights, where pidgeons and sparrows are the main wild animals encountered, how seldom I see butterflies, how I miss my parent's house with it's garden, where you see random squirrells and prowling cats when going to the bus station.

Full recommendation for this one. Even if you might usually go for fiction, maybe this could work for you.

I recieved a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

English writer and naturalist Helen MacDonald said her latest work, "Vesper Flights," work is meant to resemble a cabinet of curiosities, or Wunderkammer. Items in the cabinet -- natural and artificial -- are meant for people to handle and observe in a different way from our usual museums. The essays inside are ones that have appeared in such publications as New York Times Magazine and New Statesmen. In drawing these various pieces into one book, MacDonald's display does “rejoice in the complexity of things.” She shows readers that that not everything is about them in the natural world. She wants readers to appreciate and love difference or otherness, and to see through other eyes beyond our human ones.

Exploring the grounds near her home, MacDonald said she was drawn to work as a naturalist. She spent her childhood in Camberley, Surrey, in the United Kingdom, where she discovered nests, looked into ponds for the life teeming within, and became familiar with the many species of plants and animals that populated her sense of home.

Because this is an uncorrected proof, my attention wasn't immediately snagged as a reader. I'm so used to hard and fast starts and stops, so without those, I felt like I was on a scavenger hunt for the next new beginning. The structure reminded of the stream of consciousness writings of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf. A-ha! Maybe that's intentional? More than likely though it's just in the final formatting stage. In stream of consciousness, the writer's thoughts and reactions to events in life connect in one continuous flow. It’s not unlike the conversations I’ve had with my closest friends and relatives. The topic started in one area, connected to another topic that at first glance appeared dissimilar until the resemblance came into focus with the first.

In one essay, MacDonald talked about efforts made to help birds that migrate in places like New York City. People built these massive behemoths in the sky that became a danger to the birds because of their attraction to the artificial lights. The birds lost sight of their path, which would lead to their death. People needed to intervene to rescue them in order for them to go back to their flight path. MacDonald took this story and connected it with the dangers a Christian refugee faced as he made the perilous journey to the UK to flee persecution, only to fear he may have to return. People also entered his flight path to free him from danger on his path to safety. I found myself praying that he will not have to go back to a deadly path.

My need for order took a backseat eventually to my love of good writing. MacDonald's stories had a meditative quality. I could easily envision the places she explored and the variety of wildlife she introduced, as if it was a collective memory we shared.

Circling back to the title for her book, MacDonald described the flights of swifts – their vesper flights. Vespers are evening prayers. The swifts ascended higher and higher until she could no longer see them. I could see the swifts as a metaphor for how prayers ascend to God -- a beautiful image. And though God isn’t mentioned, I still saw His presence, almost like the book of Esther or Ruth in the Bible. MacDonald’s insights, her knowledge about the natural world, reinvigorated my sense of awe as I considered again God's created works. We haven’t even begun to plumb the depths of Earth or space. I thought this when I read about her travel to parts of Chile with Nathalie Cabrol, an astrobiologist and a planetary geologist, who led an expedition to explore high altitudes in the desert and test methods for detecting life on Mars.

My need for order took a backseat to my love a well-written, polished piece of expression. MacDonald writes so well I found her stories to have a meditative quality. I could easily envision the places she explored and the variety of wildlife she introduced to the reader, as if it was a collective memory we shared.

I love a great sentence and especially to finally put a word to something I’ve seen or experienced myself. The sight of birds swooping together in formation in what appears to be a choreographed dance to music only they hear is now known to me as a “murmuration.” The word came from the essay that was previously published Dec. 6, 2015 in the New York Times, “The Human Flock”:

“The changing shape of starling flocks comes from each bird copying the motions of the six or seven others around it with extreme rapidity: Their reaction time is less than a tenth of a second. Turns can propagate through a cloud of birds at speeds approaching 90 miles per hour, making murmurations look from a distance like a single pulsing, living organism.”

I look forward to seeing the finished work. (I really hope there are pictures!) It’s not on Amazon.com yet, but I will update you when it’s available. In the meantime, I’ve added the book she is most known for -- “H is for Hawk” -- to my reading list. It’s a memoir how training a young Northern Goshawk helped her cope with grief and depression at the sudden death in 2007 of her father, Alisdair MacDonald, a photojournalist. She won the Samuel Johnson Prize and Costa Book Award in 2014, as well as others, for this memoir.

MacDonald is a fellow migraineur, but she noted this troubling neurological condition does have a bright spot. She sees them as her muse. She touched on something I just hadn’t paired together. In the postdrome stage, she said she finds her words flow “as days seem newly forged and prone to surprising beauties” (location 750). Whoa. I’ve often thought I’m more creative after a migraine attack. I’ve wondered if it’s because the release I’ve gotten after such crippling pain and illness makes me appreciate what I’ve walked through and relaxed my mind allowing new ideas to take shape.

This is a lovely book of the author's personal observations, insights and experiences on a wide range of subjects. It is a book I will come back to for her wonderful descriptions of the natural world.

I am so torn about this book! There were moments of beautiful writing and observations however I felt disconnected with the flow of the writing. I think it was more because of the egalley format. I found myself drifting out of concentration often. I love the idea of this though! Animals and climate change, everything is connected and I really want to support Macdonald. So torn.

Vesper Flights is a luminous essay collection that I thoroughly enjoyed. This collection is different from H is for Hawk, which has a sustained chronological narrative. Going into Vesper Flights, you need to understand it's a collection of essays on disparate topics. I wish there had been chapter divisions, but that's my only complaint. I like reading Macdonald's perspective about a variety of wildlife and natural world topics. She is compassionate and smart and a fantastic writer. I could also easily envision what she described, which to me is the sign of real talent.

I received an uncorrected advance proof for this review, and regret to say that I abandoned it about 25% through. I expected to find more about Macdonald's interior life woven into these essays. This book is more of a history of environmental findings and her personal observations of nature. Many of these observations are not new to me, but perhaps it would be a good read for someone with a newly developed interest in the how our world is endangered.

Helen Macdonald is an extremely gifted writer, describing her experiences and her observations of the natural world in a way that connects, provokes, and inspires. Vesper Flights is a good book. I particularly enjoyed the essay for which the book was titled, and a portion near the end of the book when Macdonald forays into the numinous. Her brief exploration of Rudolf Otto and other thinkers gripped me most, piquing my interest as a religious studies scholar and theologian. Macdonald's writing increases my love and concern for the world, for my particular place, and for the creatures which inhabit it. She also gives me a broader understanding of what it means to be a human being.

A beautiful book of essays and vignettes by naturalist Helen Macdonald, sharing her fascinating experiences with wildlife and the outdoors. The stories are captivating and reflective, full of information about places and animals that made me read it with an accompanying Google tab always open. In particular, her essay about camping out with an astrobiologist in Chile, studying landscapes similar to those on Mars was engrossing. As a wildlife rehab volunteer, I also appreciated her conversation with a swift rehabilitator and discussion of the merits of wildlife rehabilitation. I recommend this title for anyone interested in reflective writing on nature, animals, and conservation.

Vesper Flights by Helen MacDonald is as soulful, ethereal, and engaging as the night flight of the swifts for which the book is named. The author presents information in a stream of consciousness effect that impressed me with both the depth of her knowledge and intellect along with the exquisite narrative structure that mimics the natural turns and commentary of a wise friend's interlocutions. I learned many, many things about birds, nature, humanity, and life. You will find Vesper Flights a valuable and satisfying read.

I want everyone to read Vesper Flights. Helen Macdonald writes the kind of book I love, a book that speaks of nature and humanity and how they intersect. And how they don’t. And maybe how they should and shouldn’t.

I especially would love this book to be a part of school curriculum. But why stop there? I’d love for scientists, politicians, new age practitioners, tarot card readers, ornithologists, naturalists, shamans, falconers and wildlife rehabilitators to read Vesper Flights. To name a few groups of people! ;)

Macdonald weaves great stories around her personal experiences with birds, her thoughts and how those two worlds intersect. She does it beautifully, and I found myself rereading the last few paragraphs of each vignette, sometimes out loud, so I could let the words really sink in.

Vesper Flights also contains a sobering section about our planet and its future, that will likely serve as a jumping off point for some readers to research what they can do to help.

I often find that my mind and compassion expand when I read and this is definitely true of Vesper Flights. It’s a thoughtful, honest, beautiful and engaging collection.

Thank you to Netgalley, the publisher and of course, Helen Macdonald.

With H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald wrote a showstopper that was at the top of many lists. Vesper Flights, beginning with its beautiful title, is composed of numerous essays, and at least in the prepublication galley I had, they are all strung together, no breaks. Until I understood this odd presentation, I had to put on the brakes and reread several "beginnings" to regather the context. But the material itself is mesmerizing. Whether she is talking about migratory habits and going to the top of the Empire State Building for a nature "hike," or describing her own migraines, she does so with grace, power, poetry and blazing intellect.

Vesper Flight by Helen Macdonald
Book Review by Dawn Thomas

288 Pages
Publisher: Grove Atlantic / Grove Press
Release Date: August 25, 2020

Nonfiction (Adult), Memoirs, Outdoors and Nature

This book is full of short stories. The author details her travels and interactions with nature. I especially liked the stories about the Empire State Building, the total solar eclipse and digging in the volcano. I enjoyed her style of writing and the flow of stories from one to another.

I enjoyed these very well written essays very much! I kept looking for a
Chapter 2, but no, it just gets deeper and deeper and more enjoyable.
It is very different from H is for Hawk, and it's probably not for everyone.
If you love Wildlife, I'm pretty sure this will be for you!

Thank you so much, Helen Macdonald, her publisher, and NetGalley
for the chance to read and review this great book!