This was the perfect book for fractious times, because it was lyrical and distracting, but it also had a lot to say about humans’ impact on the Earth and our relationship to birds: naming them, specifying them, writing about them, and loving or despising them. Dee has written a peculiarly British essay on gulls (never “seagulls”) and their proximity to humans; the chapter on Alfred Hitchcock and Daphne duMaurier’s versions of ‘The Birds’ alone was worth the price of the book.

Here’s a sample: “All of the world’s 135 or so species [of nightjar] are tailored somewhere between a fast owl and a stuttering moth — long sharp wings, wide-mouthed faces, blackcurrant eyes — and they are silently assembled, as are many night things, from old fabrics woven and reopen, stitched and unstitched, worn, patches, and appliqués. If an owl is a worked bag of leafy air, a nightjar is a dusty carpet that has absorbed into its pattern the thread of that which has been trodden down into it, until it cannot be said what is dirt and what is design.” (207)