The Seabird's Cry: The Lives and Loves of the Planet's Great Ocean Voyagers
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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.
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Adam Nicolson. (2018). The Seabird's Cry: The Lives and Loves of the Planet's Great Ocean Voyagers. Henry Holt and Co.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Adam Nicolson. 2018. The Seabird's Cry: The Lives and Loves of the Planet's Great Ocean Voyagers. Henry Holt and Co.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Adam Nicolson, The Seabird's Cry: The Lives and Loves of the Planet's Great Ocean Voyagers. Henry Holt and Co, 2018.
MLA Citation (style guide)Adam Nicolson. The Seabird's Cry: The Lives and Loves of the Planet's Great Ocean Voyagers. Henry Holt and Co, 2018.
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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...- isOwnedByCollections
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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.- sortTitle
- Seabirds Cry The Lives and Loves of the Planets Great Ocean Voyagers
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- reviews
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- source: The Boston Globe (a Best Book of 2018)
- content: "Wondrous and lyrical, this book swoops and dives into the art and science of natural history with as much grace as the seabirds it examines."
- premium: False
- source: Star Tribune (Critics' Choice, Top 10 of 2018)
- content: "Beautifully written, haunting in imagery and filled with marvels, the book is also a farewell salute to a once teeming dimension of the natural world, now increasingly devastated by human environmental malfeasance."
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- source: Publishers Weekly (starred review)
- content: "A moving exploration . . . Demonstrates that wonder about the natural world can be deepened by increasing one's knowledge of it and that emotional wisdom can be reinforced by the acquisition of practical information. He blends insightful ethological observations with elements of the mythical and peppers his delivery of practical, premodern knowledge with poetic imagery . . . whimsical . . . appeals to both the mind and the heart . . . Nicolson combines a huge amount of scientific information with deeply emotional content and the net effect is moving and quietly profound."
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Starred review from December 4, 2017
In this moving exploration of 10 groups of seabirds, English writer Nicolson (Why Homer Matters) demonstrates that wonder about the natural world can be deepened by increasing one’s knowledge of it and that emotional wisdom can be reinforced by the acquisition of practical information. He blends insightful ethological observations with elements of the mythical and peppers his delivery of practical, premodern knowledge with poetic imagery. Nicolson paints the human-bird connection as intimate yet alien, writing of seabirds that their “gothic beauty is beyond touching distance” and a “miracle of otherness.” But he also immerses readers in the umwelt, or subjective world, of each bird without resorting to anthropomorphism, as when he describes the “odor landscape” that connects the shearwater to its phytoplankton food. Nicolson’s metaphorical language flows gracefully, with hints of the whimsical, and appeals to both the mind and the heart. While he takes ecological concerns seriously, his approach is as much a musing on the future as a call to action, placing humans in the role of participants in the natural world rather than in the roles of controllers or saviors. Nicolson combines a huge amount of scientific information with deeply emotional content and the net effect is moving and quietly profound. Illus.
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December 15, 2017
At home on sea, land, and in air, seabirds demonstrate grace, power, and amazing ingenuity.Naturalist, essayist, and historian Nicolson (Why Homer Matters, 2014, etc.) offers intimate, engrossing portraits of 10 seabirds, based on abundant scientific research as well as firsthand observation in the birds' natural habitats: the Shiants islands in the Outer Hebrides, Orkney, the Faeroes, Iceland, Norway, the coasts of Maine and Ireland, the Falklands, South Georgia, the Canaries, and the Azores. Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and Ondaatje Prize, among other accolades, the author conveys with grace and precision the birds' "life-habits and body-shapes, their various forms of adaptation, their ways of conquest and triumph." Seabirds are ancient: fossil evidence dates some nesting sites at 44,000 years old. "The great cave paintings of the paleolithic are not as old" as a snow petrel's fossilized stomach oil; penguins "were doing what they do now well before humankind was in Europe or the Americas." Their survival strategies are astonishing. To feed their chicks, for example, puffins fly hundreds of miles to capture high-energy oily fish, each diving between 600 and 1,150 times daily to provide 8 to 10 feeds. A herring gull, noticing that humans were tossing bread to ducks in a pond, grabbed a piece, broke the bread into small pieces, and caught the goldfish that came up to nibble on the crumbs. Gulls, Nicolson observes, "are opportunistic omnivores," but this one seemed uncommonly clever, although not as clever as crows, ravens, and parrots. Nurturing chicks does not always result in benevolence. Nicolson reminds readers of the "rawness" of animals, such as the "extraordinarily aggressive" gannet the Nazca booby, which lays two eggs a few weeks apart. If both hatch, the elder chick pushes its sibling out of the nest to its death by starvation or dehydration. Despite their resilience and adaptability, seabirds are vulnerable to climate change and pollution, such as rubbish and plastics, which shearwaters, fulmars, petrels, and albatrosses often mistake for food.A buoyant celebration of seabirds that serves as an important reminder of nature's fragility.COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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February 1, 2018
Nicolson (Why Homer Matters) has written several other books, including ones on Homer, Windsor Castle, and the King James Bible. But what does the author know about seabirds? A great deal. He has researched the literature, worked with experts in the field, and plumbed historical narratives. The result is an astonishing, well-written account of albatrosses, gulls, shearwaters, petrels, auks, penguins, and other birds of the sea. Here, the overexploitation of marine resources, including the slaughters of these phenomenal aquatic species, is given a perceptive analysis. Nicolson incorporates relevant references to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Captain Cook, Charles Darwin, William Shakespeare, and Alfred Lord Tennyson along with native populations. Worldwide in purview, this work is strongest in its British associations, but most of the species covered here are found on both sides of the Atlantic, with many in the Pacific as well. Others, such as albatrosses and penguins, are Southern Hemisphere denizens. The book is well-illustrated with extensive chapter notes and a worthwhile index. VERDICT An amazing tour de force that is highly recommended for all interested in natural history, conservation, the sea, and maritime history.--Henry T. Armistead, formerly with Free Lib. of Philadelphia
Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Starred review from February 1, 2018
The new volcanic island of Surtsey appeared next to Iceland in 1963, and by 1970, seabirds had begun to nest on its cliffs. Riding the winds and fishing the seas, the seabirds are tied to the land for breeding and exploit the ocean's edges all over the world. These denizens of three realms have fascinated author Nicolson (Why Homer Matters, 2015) since his father took him to see the hundreds of thousands of birds nesting on the Shiants, islets in the Hebrides, when he was eight. As he examines the lives of 10 seabirds, from the extinct great auk to the wandering albatross, and from the gulls to the cormorants, Nicolson quotes from sources as varied as Coleridge and other poets, scientific studies, memoirs, and local folks. He follows the birds around the Atlantic's edges, and as he says of the fulmar, one gets an overwhelming sense of the mastery these birds display. Marveling at lives lived in some of the harshest places on the planet, Nicolson writes lyrically of birds most of us only briefly notice when visiting a rocky shoreline, beings possessing extraordinary forms of understanding we have never shared.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)
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