The Running Sky: A Bird-Watching Life by Tim Dee

The Running Sky: A Bird-Watching Life Reviews

• 
  Hugh

  This was a present that I feel hopelessly unqualified to review.
  
  Dee has spent half a century watching and listening to birds in Britain and around the world. He clearly has a wealth of experience and enthusiasm to share, but my experience of the subject is so limited that much of it went over my head (almost literally), and I was left sympathising with his son's "comically wilful ornithological ignorance".
  
  I was able to appreciate the quality of the writing, the range and arrangement of the subject matter and the many poets quoted, but I must admit that for me it was a bit of a struggle to read.
  
  No criticism of the book, the writer or the subject intended!
• 
  Rebecca

  (4.5) As soon as I finished Dee’s new book,
  Greenery, one of my top few nonfiction reads of 2020, I took this down from the shelf. Published in the UK as The Running Sky, it’s a more straightforward memoir of a life watching birds; “I have lived my life under birds and I cannot remember a single birdless day,” he writes. As in Greenery, though, he weaves a complicated mesh of memories and recent experiences, meditations and allusions. He moves from one June to the next and travels from Shetland to Zambia, though most often he’s not that far from Bristol, where he grew up. The most powerful chapter, “The Gorge,” is about watching peregrines at Bristol’s famous bridge over the Avon – where he also, as a teen, saw someone commit suicide. It’s the sort of piece that deserves to be reprinted in anthologies. The attention to bird behavior, to rhythms of time and weather, to the cycles of life events – this is extraordinary, if not quite as accomplished as Greenery.
  
  Some favorite lines:
  
  “For as long as I have known what migration means I have wanted to be alongside moving birds.”
  
  “Science makes discoveries when it admits to not knowing; poetry endures if it looks hard at real things. Nature writing, if such a thing exists, lives in this territory where science and poetry might meet. It must be made of both; it needs truth and beauty.”
• 
  Fiona

  If you enjoy Kathleen Jamie's writing, you'll enjoy this. It leaves you with the same inner calm. Tim Dee writes beautifully and poetically. This is not a book to read cover to cover. It's a book to dip into when you're in the right mood.
• 
  Juliet Wilson

  The Running Sky records a lifetime of looking at birds, organised into a bird's year from one summer to the next. Dee maps his own observations and encounters over four decades, from watching storm petrels on the island of Mousa in Shetland (a trip I've made twice and can recommend to anyone who loves birds) to exploring the variety of birds in Zambia.
  
  There are explorations of the nightingale's song and how the birdlife of the English city of Bristol has changed over his lifetime, plus musings about birds in literature. The writing is often beautiful and thoughtful:
  
  "[The jackdaws'] genius for riding the air seems to show its shape; pockets and waves and channels and funnels; but as I peer at them, the wind watering my eyes, I find myself marvelling at their irreducible and specific marking of the sky at that moment. If you try and empty your head and open your eyes and just watch the birds, you see they are not a metaphor for anything..."
  
  I had a real problem with the January chapter that focussed on a very large collection of dead birds and eggs that had been collected by someone in Zambia. This was presented entirely without context and although it was obvious that most of the collection was historical (and therefore useful for scientific study without being currently problematic, as of course attitudes were different back then...) it seemed as though the collector was still active in collecting nests and eggs, which fact wasn't commented on. (These days we know this is something we shouldn't do, surely?). Plus, alongside this account was a narrative about a current scientific study of birds nests, which didn't entirely dispel the sense that these nests were being raided to study the eggs. This section desperately needed a statement about the importance of not collecting nests or eggs.
• 
  Drew Pyke

  I wish I could give 2.5 stars. There are real benefits to reading this book, by learning new things about birds you know of (like how robins use ant acid to rid themselves of lice) and about birds you never see plainly in the UK (like the woodcock and nightjar).
  There is a really worrying chapter (January) where he visits a major in Africa, describing the industrial scale genocide of birds which he undertakes in pursuit of scientific study. In a separate chapter he also glorifies the taking of eggs "egg collecting was ... a natural expression of ... curiosity". This makes the author seem more like a stamp collector rather than a lover of birds. Plus, his personal story is very dull (saw someone fall off a cliff and his dad drank a bit too much) and comes across way too pretentious with the use of lofty references to Greek mythology. He also claims Keats Ode to a Nightingale is a detailed study of the bird song (I can't find any reference to it in the poem!). He also slanders Gibraltar as a sub-human species whilst glorifying Africa like a true rah-rah imperialist.
  The best chapter for me was where he explains that birdwatching shouldn't be a scientific exercise but for the enjoyment of it, using John Buxton as his argument (who wrote about Redstarts whilst in POW captivity without a notepad to observe them for a long period of time).
  Whilst a good book to learn about bird species, it is just unfortunate the author comes across as unlikeable.
• 
  K LF

  Read slowly, so detailed, so poetic - worth savouring.
  
  A super read about the seasons, longing, growing up and the beautiful melancholy of life - worth reading even for those who aren't nature lovers!
• 
  Bookhuw

  Dee has some thought-provoking reflections to offer in this book - the chapter on the Bristol Gorge is especially melancholic - but this is far too flowery, descending into overly poetic exaltations which I found rather alienating. Some of the digressions are just plain bewildering: was a four page list of times he has seen, heard or merely thought about Starlings really necessary?
• 
  Anne Thomas

  This feels like a deeply personal book, as much about the author as it is about the birds he's encountered over a lifetime of birdwatching. This makes it an intimate read, letting the reader deep into Dee's memories and foibles and gut reactions and sensory experiences of birds; at the same time I also occasionally had trouble settling into it, the thought patterns and metaphors so seemingly specific to the author's mind, the style slightly rough-edged at times. But I could also appreciate this eccentricity of voice (who else would juxtapose birdsong with a pathology lab in Moscow via an analogy of a microscope slide of the landscape?), and most of the time his descriptions of the birds and their landscapes were mesmerizing and his passion resonant and contagious. As a birdwatcher myself I related intensely to the out-of-body thrill of witnessing elusive moments of birds' lives or a species I haven't encountered before, these windows onto a parallel universe. As always, I appreciated the pins he puts on the map of England, mostly places I haven't been but with an echo of familiarity from my time in East Anglia and expanding my horizons by proxy. Dee is also especially good at spinning up spatial perception of migration pathways, tracing that parallel world to the size of the globe. Similar to Robert Macfarlane, his familiarity with the existing British literature of birds and nature was evident and threaded in nicely (though sometimes a bit over my head; I have some studying to do I think).
• 
  Clothears

  I came to this book from Kathleen Jamie's wonderful 'Sightlines' (5 stars from me) as both authors shared a journey to a seabird colony in Shetland. Jamie's book is engaging, thought-provoking and beautiful but I'm afraid I really didn't get on with Dee's. I found it over-written in many parts which distanced me from the subject matter rather than bringing the experiences closer. Rather than engaging it was frustrating, and never cohered around anything - sometimes it wanted to be about the poetry of John Clare (but we didn't get enough to get a feel for it), sometimes it was autobiographical (first kiss and witnessing a suicide), sometimes it was pondering migration (but the thoughts were inane). In the end I'm afraid I hated it. The cover art is really nice but what does the title mean?
• 
  Ruth Brumby

  Memories of a a life of birdwatching, of various species in various places, are well combined into a structure that goes through the year as well as through his life. There are interesting literary references as he eventually realised that both aspects of life were important to him, covering older poetry as well as contemporary 'nature' writers.
• 
  Flynn O'Dacre

  “The first living wren I held made me feel like I had caught a falling star but, since it was science that had brought us together, I kept quiet and didn’t own up to this.”
  
  A slightly dry memoir, but he captured the feeling of watching a small bird go about its daily business perfectly so I’m a fan.
• 
  Brian Stacey

  Beautiful writing - but tedious.
• 
  Jennifer

  I found this book rather difficult to get into and feared for a while that, however beautiful the nature writing in detail, I would ultimately be underwhelmed by the whole. It didn't help that this was a beautiful new edition of the book, with a gorgeous turquoise cover and very appropriate detailed starling, all beautifully proportioned... but slightly squatter than a normal paperback with not enough margin and a real effort to keep open enough to read. So I wrestled with it in several ways.
  
  But in the end I liked this book much better than Dee's later Four Fields. More explicitly autobiographical, it moves through a year month by month, starting at June. It wasn't until November that I knew he had really got me, there in Bristol at the Avon Gorge, doing his paper round over the Clifton Suspension Bridge. There seem to be a lot of these bird watching or naturalist literary types about... able (seemingly) to pull a bird ID or a quotation from their minds with equal ease. In the wrong mood, it could irritate... as could the distinct and chronic at best dysthymia. There is a great deal of morbidity in this book - gloom but also the detached interest in death. His description of a young son 'wearing' a dead gannet he has found on the beach was particularly good.
  
  It's still all a bit random, but deftly handled and not bent out of shape in an attempt to make it fit some kind of theme.
• 
  Mark Little

  Fo me, there is a special category of book - those which are not to be rushed at on publication, but should be held back for that right moment. This is one of them. The Running Sky was published over ten years ago and it went on my wishlist at the time. But it was only this year that it had its moment. Having read it once, I almost want to start again.
  
  It is a guided flight; through the year, through a lifetime, all with the added colour of cultural reflection. Poetry, the music of Tallis and the lives of birdwatchers. At once, fascinating and absorbing. One of those books which open up many different, tangential byways. Written by a master of the craft. I have now moved on to the rest of Tim Dee’s books, the time is right.
  
  I should finish up by saying that the whole reading experience is enhanced by the tactile Vintage paperback edition, which is a joy to hold.
• 
  Paulfozz

  Although perhaps containing a little too much exposition of poetry than of Tim's birdwatching life for my taste, this nevertheless is a very good read, with an interesting mixture of evocation and plain-spoken account. It assembles events from Tim's birding life into a month-by-month chronicle, with many passages that I found quite emotional to read. It's clear that Tim has as much love for language as for birds, the style reminds me a little of Richard Mabey, who also flits between discussion of the natural world and language.
• 
  空

  For sure Dee was aiming for poetry, but sometimes there were just too many words. Also he really liked putting in long quotations from other books, which were okay every now and then but at some point it felt like Dee had set a goal for himself to have a long quote for every chapter.
  
  Also there were sections about his life, which … I guess I just wasn’t expecting that much autobiographical detail in what I was hoping was a book about birbs?
  
  The cover is really nice though.
• 
  Clif Smith

  A British bird journal. Overly poetic and sordy. Too may extravagant descriptions and attempts to awe the reader.
• 
  MJ

  Very poetic
  very ethereal
  
  No grit
  Boring
• 
  Maureen

  I love nature writing. I love birds. I love the U.K. The first chapter was exquisite.
• 
  Steve Halton

  A beautiful piece of creative writing blending childhood, birds and landscape. An evocative and sensitive book. Everyone should read this!