Waiting for the Albino Dunnock: How birds can change your life
Rosamond Richardson
May 2017 · Weidenfeld & Nicolson · Narrated by Jane Whittenshaw
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10 hr 30 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook
Written by a beginner-birdwatcher with the freshness and passion of a convert, WAITING FOR THE ALBINO DUNNOCK explores the world of birds through the seasons of a single year. It describes encounters with particular birds in the landscapes of East Anglia where the author is rooted. Occasional journeys farther afield take the reader to truly wild places in the Outer Hebrides and Eastern Europe. Yet the ordinary experience of birdwatching is also far more than just that. The beauty of birds has the power to change lives, as it did the author's, and as in the case of the all-but-legendary snow leopard, it is more about the search than the result.
Personal and elegiac in tone, the writing is an unusual combination of prose poems based on the actual experience of seeing a specific bird for the first time, woven with elements of science and wisdom traditions, ornithology (and its punning counterpart ornitheology), mythology and philosophy, taxonomy and history, literature and folklore, conveying the wider picture of what it means to be human in relationship to nature. WAITING FOR THE ALBINO DUNNOCK explores the degree to which wildness is embedded in the human psyche and how beauty is central to our mental and emotional wellbeing, while highlighting the careless damage we are inflicting on the natural world.
Read by Jane Whittenshaw
(p) 2017 Orion Publishing Group
Personal and elegiac in tone, the writing is an unusual combination of prose poems based on the actual experience of seeing a specific bird for the first time, woven with elements of science and wisdom traditions, ornithology (and its punning counterpart ornitheology), mythology and philosophy, taxonomy and history, literature and folklore, conveying the wider picture of what it means to be human in relationship to nature. WAITING FOR THE ALBINO DUNNOCK explores the degree to which wildness is embedded in the human psyche and how beauty is central to our mental and emotional wellbeing, while highlighting the careless damage we are inflicting on the natural world.
Read by Jane Whittenshaw
(p) 2017 Orion Publishing Group
Ratings and reviews
5.0
1 review
James Lee
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April 23, 2023
Superb.
About the author
Rosamond Richardson is the author of several books about the countryside, including the international bestseller Country Wisdom. She wrote regularly for Britain's biggest-selling bird magazine Bird Watching, and for several years was a contributor to The Countryman. Familiar to many as author of the Penguin Classic Hedgerow Cookery and co-presenter of BBC Two's Discovering Hedgerows, she also wrote for Landscape and Countryside magazines. She died in May 2017.
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