Adam Nicolson in Conversation with Carl Safina | The Seabird’s Cry: The Lives and Loves of the Planet’s Great Ocean Voyagers

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Seabirds have always entranced the human imagination and Adam Nicolson has been in love with them all his life: for their mastery of wind and ocean, their aerial beauty and the unmatched wildness of the coasts and islands where every summer they return to breed. The Seabird’s Cry is an utterly charming work that breaks down the barriers between poetry and science. The book is divided into ten chapter, each dedicated to a different bird, and each beautifully illustrated. The Seabird’s Cry travels the ocean paths along with puffins, fulmars, gulls, albatrosses, and more looking at the way their bodies work, the sense of their own individuality, the strategies and tactics needed to survive and thrive in the most demanding environment on earth.

Writing lucid prose and drawing upon meticulously research, Nicolson brings the reader into the world of seabirds: the ways in which puffins walk around with “Edwardian propriety”; the lifelong marriages of albatrosses; the mysterious fulmar and how it manages to fly through storms. Any lover of nature writing will find this book fascinating.