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The Wise Hours

A Journey into the Wild and Secret World of Owls

Audiobook
84 of 84 copies available
84 of 84 copies available
Owls have existed for over sixty million years, and in the relatively short time we have shared the planet with these majestic birds they have ignited the human imagination. But even as owls continue to captivate our collective consciousness, celebrated British nature writer Miriam Darlington finds herself struck by all she doesn't know about the true nature of these enigmatic creatures.
Darlington begins her fieldwork in the British Isles with her teenage son, Benji. As her avian fascination grows, she travels to France, Serbia, Spain, Finland, and the frosted Lapland borders of the Arctic for rare encounters with the barn owl, tawny owl, long-eared owl, pygmy owl, snowy owl, and more. But when her son develops a mysterious illness, her quest to understand the elusive nature of owls becomes entangled with her search for finding a cure.
In The Wise Hours, Darlington watches and listens to the natural world and to the rhythms of her home and family, inviting listeners to discover the wonders of owls alongside her while rewilding our imagination with the mystery, fragility, and magnificence of all creatures.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from October 31, 2022
      Nature writing and memoir make a winning mix in this lyrical survey of owl species from poet Darlington (Otter Country: In Search of the Wild Otter). Darlington had planned a yearlong exploration of “the incremental shift owls have experienced, and still are experiencing, from wildness to a kind of enforced domesticity” as a result of human actions. But early on, her 19-year-old son developed an inexplicable illness that caused seizures and threatened his education, career, and life. Darlington describes searching for a diagnosis and treatment alongside her fieldwork with the birds, which she conveys in immersive prose: “The white petals of the eyelids, with their slivers of black pressed just beneath; the pale skin of the cere—the skin around the top of the beak—fading into the nostrils,” she writes of a barn owl. There are bird facts galore—pygmy owls have a “pleasant flute-like hoot” and snowy owls have “the most densely feathered feet and toes of any owl”—and Darlington’s persistence in the face of adversity is moving (“This trip will wait for when Benji is better, and I’ll take him with me,” she writes in the epilogue). Fans of Jon Dunn’s The Glitter in the Green: In Search of Hummingbirds should check out this dazzling account.

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  • English

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