This is a gorgeous book. Stunning. A learning to see.
Self heard about it at last year’s Cambridge Literary Festival (which featured a number of panels on the environment)
pp. 17 – 18:
In my lifetime gulls have come toward us. Most other birds have gone in the opposite direction, but the gulls have bucked the trend. In part we made them do so; in part the birds elected to fly that way. And they continue to tell something of how the once-wild can share our present world. Calling them seagulls is wrong — that was one of the first things I learned as a novice bird-boy. They are as much inland among us as they are far out over the waves. Yet, in fact, this state of life for them is far from new. Over the past hundred years, human modernity has brought gulls ashore.

Stay tuned, dear blog reader. Stay tuned.