Shearwater: A Bird, an Ocean, and a Long Way Home

Part travelogue, part memoir, Morgan-Grenville’s book delivers an engaging account of one of our least accessible breeding birds, the Manx Shearwater. The13 chapters are structured around a narrative journey, beginning under the watchful gaze of a grandmother whose strong presence shapes the remainder of the book. The story of the Manx Shearwater, both in its breeding colonies and out on the open ocean, is told in a way that brings together the bird’s ecology with acutely judged but lightly handled human observation. Through this approach we follow the author as he experiences the nocturnal arrivals of shearwaters at their breeding sites and meets the seabird ecologists working to understand this rather enigmatic bird. From the islands of Rum and Skomer, to the Península Valdés in Argentina, Morgan-Grenville’s travels follow those of our Manx Shearwaters as they return to their true home, a life on the wing that takes them across huge distances of ocean. This very well written book, touched with humour and presenting knowledge that is lightly-worn, provides an accessible and engaging introduction to this wonderful bird and to those remote places on the margins of our archipelago where, for a few brief weeks, it is tied to a terrestrial existence.

Book reviewed by Mike Toms