Windhover (A Year Among Kestrels)

What happens when you spend a year looking at the world through the eyes of a kestrel? What’s it like to be a kestrel? As a leading wildlife conservationist, Laurence Rose spent four decades working with nature for a living. But it was only when he retired that he had the chance to observe one single family of ‘windhovers’ (to give kestrels their traditional name). What did the world look like, he wondered, from their point of view? Combining a scientist’s curiosity with a naturalist’s awe, he set out to document a year in the life of his local dale – with its microdramas, joys and tragedies – from the kestrels’ perspective. Putting himself in the mind of the birds gave him a raptor’s-eye view of the landscape, revealing the relative insignificance of humans in their world. At a time when society is more disconnected than ever from nature, Windhover re-roots itself in the firm ground of natural history to encourage a simpler engagement with the natural world. Lyrical but never romantic, Rose offers a meditation on the forces that shape landscape, from the microscopic to the cosmic, and on all life, not just our own. For readers of Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk and Mark Cocker’s Crow Country.