The Seabird's Cry by Adam Nicolson

I really loved this book. I have spent the last year making up for a previous lifetime of largely ignoring birds and trying to learn more about them. I spent three days of exceptionally bad weather at the San Diego Bird Festival in 2023 finding out what I had been missing, and since then have read about 20 books devoted to birds, and this is one of my absolute favorites. This glorious book is a poetic, soaring exploration of 10 species of seabirds: gull, guillemot, gannet, albatross, puffins, auks, and so on – which revels in the way they “float like beings from the otherworld”. I love how it includes the good, the bad, and the ugly, with a humorous eye and a sense of wonder about just how extraordinary sea birds are. This is also a visceral book, full of hardy, bloodthirsty birds. The author opens with how he came to love birds--it began with his father, who himself had an early love affair with sea birds. His father actually bought the Shiants, the Hebridean islands teeming with puffin, razorbill and kittiwake – so he comes by it naturally. If you only read one bird book let it be this one.