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Published Feb 2018
416 pages
Genre: Science, Health and the Environment
Publication Information
Life itself could never have been sustainable without seabirds. As Adam Nicolson writes: "They are bringers of fertility, the deliverers of life from ocean to land."
A global tragedy is unfolding. Even as we are coming to understand them, the number of seabirds on our planet is in freefall, dropping by nearly 70% in the last sixty years, a billion fewer now than there were in 1950. Of the ten birds in this book, seven are in decline, at least in part of their range. Extinction stalks the ocean and there is a danger that the grand cry of the seabird colony, rolling around the bays and headlands of high latitudes, will this century become little but a memory.
Seabirds have always entranced the human imagination and NYT best-selling author Adam Nicolson has been in love with them all his life: for their mastery of wind and ocean, their aerial beauty and the unmatched wildness of the coasts and islands where every summer they return to breed. The seabird's cry comes from an elemental layer in the story of the world.
Over the last couple of decades, modern science has begun to understand their epic voyages, their astonishing abilities to navigate for tens of thousands of miles on featureless seas, their ability to smell their way towards fish and home. Only the poets in the past would have thought of seabirds as creatures riding the ripples and currents of the entire planet, but that is what the scientists are seeing now today.
"Starred Review. Nicolson combines a huge amount of scientific information with deeply emotional content and the net effect is moving and quietly profound." - Publishers Weekly
"A buoyant celebration of seabirds that serves as an important reminder of nature's fragility." - Kirkus
This information about The Seabird's Cry was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Adam Nicolson writes books on history and the landscape. He was born in 1957, the son of the author Nigel Nicolson and grandson of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. He was educated at Eton and Magdalene College, Cambridge. He has worked widely as a journalist (British Press Awards Feature Writer of the Year 1997, shortlist) and for many years wrote weekly columns in the Daily and Sunday Telegraph. He lives at Sissinghurst in Kent with his wife Sarah Raven and is the father of five children.
A New York Times bestselling author, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Society of Antiquaries in Scotland, Adam Nicolson has won many major awards including the Somerset Maugham Award, the W. H. Heinemann Award, and the Ondaatje Prize. His books include Why Homer Matters ...
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