This is a collection of essays. Naturally, any collection is going to have some that are better than others, some that speak to a reader more than others, but this collection is remarkably consistent and coherent.

Many of the essays are biographical, so Macdonald talks a lot about her strange but often delightful childhood and her growing love of nature, as well as her career as a naturalist and writer.

One of the major themes found throughout the book is the relationship between humans and nature, with a particular focus on what the relationship between humans and animals says about human identity, particularly national identity. She is British, and wrote a lot of these essays during and after Brexit, so there are several essays about the role birds play in British nationalism. There are also a lot of more personal essays about the role animals have played in her life and her understanding of her own identity and place in the world.

"Animals don’t exist in order to teach us things, but that is what they have always done, and most of what they teach us is what we think we know about ourselves." ( )

Slightly uneven as any collection of essays probably would be, but there are real delights in here. Some of my favorites were "Eclipse," "Vesper Flights," and "Goats," which made me laugh out loud. Lovely writing and often thought-provoking as well. ( )

In this series of forty-one essays, Helen Macdonald writes beautifully about the natural world and how humans interact with it. It is a unique combination of scientific and poetic writing. She addresses topics such as deer, hares, swans, various birds, mushrooms, badgers, trees, and fireflies. She offers insight into habitat destruction, decreasing biodiversity, and climate change. She includes observations about Brexit and the refugee crisis. It can feel a bit fragmented and, as in many collections, I enjoyed some essays more than others. It is obvious that Macdonald loves nature, and her passion comes through in her writing. I listened to the audio book, read by the author. She has a pleasant reading voice and creates a peaceful ambiance. ( )

Alone among the literate world, I was made uncomfortable by the relationship between naturalist Macdonald and Mabel the formerly wild hawk told in H is for Hawk. These essays on many topics are written in Author Macdonald's justly celebrated elegant prose, and include so many aperçus that my commonplace book blew up. If you don't share my unease with people venerating wildness while taming it out of a fellow being, you'll enjoy this collection without my unshakeable unease. ( )

So much to admire: the writing which is both straightforward but full of riches of all kinds; MacDonald's introspective honesty and hard-won self-awareness; her willingness to work hard and sensitivity to her surroundings, oh, and just plain old knowledge on top of all that. She knows her birds, plants, mushrooms, trees and animals and has learned to notice what she doesn't yet know. One of MacDonald's gifts is to connect some current obsession or sudden awareness of a bird or animal with (to paraphrase) something she is in need of learning in her life, a truly magical synergy that the 'science' side has trouble acknowledging the importance of. The essay on deer is painful but the fact that she discovers on a walk that she has, heretofore, simply ignored learning about deer is an example, of how sometimes you resist in order to preserve mystery, but while you do that you could be reducing the realities of that animal to your own imagined needs, that there is a place in-between you can arrive at with care. MacDonald explores this border, between what animals and birds really are, and how we imagine they are and the resulting dissonances. Another essay along this theme (I could mention something about each and every essay, but I will spare you) touches on the way an animal will often make itself present at a time of duress in a person's life. Very often an animal that is highly unusual--almost everyone has a story. For me it was finding a pheasant roosting on the garden wall between our house and the neighbor in Philadelphia at 6 a.m. (this, a totally urban environment in center city) at a turning point in my life. Virtually everyone has a similar story. The screech owl out the window three nights in a row after my aunt's husband died; a deer encounter, all three of us staring at one another for as long as a minute at no more than ten feet (my daughter 2 1/2 in a pack on my back) that I witnessed launching her into an awareness of the existence of a whole world out there apart from her. ( )