Nests -- Nothing Like a Pig -- Inspector Calls -- Field Guides -- Tekels Park -- High-Rise -- The Human Flock -- The Student's Tale -- Ants -- Symptomatic -- Sex, Death, Mushrooms -- Winter Woods -- Eclipse -- In Her Orbit -- Hares -- Lost, But Catching Up -- Swan Upping -- Nestboxes -- Deer in the Headlights -- The Falcon and the Tower -- Vesper Flights -- In Spight of Prisons -- Sun Birds and Cashmere Spheres -- The Observatory -- Wicken -- Storm -- Murmurations -- A Cuckoo in the House -- The Arrow-Stork -- Ashes -- A Handful of Corn -- Berries -- Cherry Stones -- Birds, Tabled -- Hiding -- Eulogy -- Rescue -- Goats -- Dispatches from the Valleys -- The Numinous Ordinary -- What Animals Taught Me.

Macdonald combines some of her best loved essays with new pieces. Her topics range from nostalgia for a vanishing countryside to the tribulations of farming ostriches to her own private vespers while trying to fall asleep. Meditating on notions of captivity and freedom, immigration and flight, she writes about the unexpected guidance and comfort we find when watching wildlife. --adapted from jacket.

First published: United Kingdom : Jonathan Cape, 2020.