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    Raptor: A Journey through Birds
    Unavailable
    Raptor: A Journey through Birds
    Unavailable
    Raptor: A Journey through Birds
    Ebook358 pages5 hours

    Raptor: A Journey through Birds

    By James Macdonald Lockhart

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    From the merlin to the golden eagle, the goshawk to the honey buzzard, James Macdonald Lockhart’s stunning debut is a quest of beak, talon, wing, and sky. On its surface, Raptor is a journey across the British Isles in search of fifteen species of birds of prey, but as Lockhart seeks out these elusive predators, his quest becomes so much more: an incomparably elegant elegy on the beauty of the British landscape and, through the birds, a journey toward understanding an awesome power at the heart of the natural world—a power that is majestic and frightening in its strength, but also fragile.

    Taking as his guide the nineteenth-century Scottish naturalist and artist William MacGillivray, Lockhart loosely follows the historical trail forged by MacGillivray as he ventured from Aberdeen to London filling his pockets with plants and writing and illustrating the canonical A History of British Birds. Linking his journey to that of his muse, Lockhart shares his own encounters with raptors ranging from the scarce osprey to the successfully reintroduced red kite, a species once protected by medieval royal statute, revealing with poetic immediacy the extraordinary behaviors of these birds and the extreme environments they call home.

    Creatures both worshipped and reviled, raptors have a talon-hold on the human heart and imagination. With his book, Lockhart unravels these complicated ties in a work by turns reverent and euphoric—an interweaving of history, travel, and nature writing at its best. A hymn to wanderers, to the land and to the sky, and especially to the birds, Raptor soars.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateApr 7, 2017
    ISBN9780226470610
    Unavailable
    Raptor: A Journey through Birds
    Author

    James Macdonald Lockhart

    James Macdonald Lockhart is an associate editor of, and regular contributor to, Archipelago Magazine, and a literary agent at Antony Harwood Limited.

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    Reviews for Raptor

    3.5/5

    8 ratings2 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A lovely mix of history and natural history. It introduces William MacGillivray, the underrated ornithologist ,to those of us who have never heard of him. James MacDonald Lockhart writes a lot about the spaces in between, and his has to fit his raptor watching into the spaces of his own life. It is also a heartbreaking story of absences and persecution, both historic and ongoing.
    • 4/5
      Raptors have captivated and enthralled man for millennia. Remains of sea eagles have been found in Neolithic tombs and imagery of these magnificent creatures have been discovered all over Europe in art dating back thousands of years. These birds are the pinnacle of the food chain, each having some specialty that makes them super deadly killers. In his debut book, Lockhart uses a chapter to explore each of the 15 species of raptors that live and breed in this country visiting parts of the country from the far north in Orkney, to the sunny climes of south Devon, where it is best to see these magnificent birds.

      But there is more to this book than just the raptors. It is also an eulogy to the Scottish naturalist William MacGillivray. He was an artist and writer of some repute, and was famous for walking over 800 miles from Aberdeen to London with the intention of visiting the British Museum’s natural history and bird section. Along the way he collected many plants, and was described as a walking scarecrow at times. MacGillivray was also fascinated by the raptor, though he thinks nothing of killing the subjects of his study, but he did contribute much to the study of all things wild.

      It is the raptors that star in the book though. In each of the locations he visits, Lockhart is prepared to camp out and wait for the birds to appear on their daily hunts. He sits watching massive sea eagles harassing gulls for the fish that they have caught, trying to catch the blistering fast peregrines hunt over Coventry cathedral, sees red kites hovering over the Welsh Hills and a hobby plucking dragonflies from the air at the Arne peninsular in Dorset. Each of the birds has a moment to shine in its chapter. He notes other birds that he encounters on his trips, from the tiny wrens that flit throught the hedgerows, ravens that mob buzzards, to a surreal

      Whilst this is a really good debut book by Lockhart, it sadly doesn’t soar like the birds he is following. His writing is lyrical and the detail on each of the raptors and his journeys to see them is fascinating, but I think the addition of MacGillivray’s epic journey, even though there is strong links to what Lockhart is writing about, is a bit of a distraction. There is precious little on the challenges facing these birds even today; they are still poisoned and shot by gamekeepers and by others afraid of losing livestock. That said, Lockheart has the potential to be a quality natural history writer and I am looking forward to his next book.