Flight Lines: Tracking the Wonders of Bird Migration

by Mike Toms

Whether it is the sight of the summer’s first Swallow or the sound of a spring Cuckoo, the return of our summer migrants delivers a reassuring sense of a globe that, as the poet Ted Hughes once described, ‘is still working’. That birds should undertake such long and dangerous migratory journeys is something that has long fascinated us, prompting works of art and literature, not to mention many thousands of scientific studies.

The BTO’s Flight Lines project, a joint initiative with the Society of Wildlife Artists (SWLA), highlights through art and narrative the challenges that migrant birds face and brings to a wider audience the research and conservation work that is being done to help them.

By pairing artists, storytellers and photojournalists with the researchers and volunteers studying our summer migrants, the book tells the stories of our migrant birds, and the work being done to secure a future for them. Includes artwork by SWLA member artists Carry Akroyd, Kim Atkinson, Federico Gemma, Richard Johnson, Szabolcs Kokay, Harriet Mead, Bruce Pearson, Greg Poole, Dafila Scott, Jane Smith, John Threlfall, Esther Tyson, Matt Underwood, Michael Warren, Darren Woodhead and others.

Hardcover

Published January 1, 2017

About the author

Mike is head of garden ecology at the British Trust for Ornithology. He has written and co-written several bird books.

Reviews

[5greenway · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful book, looking at 'our' summer (and winter and times between) visitors through the eyes of artists and those carrying out painstaking conservation work. Usual sobering data, but seeds of hope in international cooperation and dialogue. Even though it's such a familiar concept, still mind-boggling to think of the tiny grasshopper warblers we heard locally this week forging their way across the Sahara and on to arrive in the English springtime.