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

As a child, when Morgan-Grenville (Liquid Gold) first saw the flap-flap-flap-glide of Manx shearwater birds in flight, he was immediately hooked. A half century later, Morgan-Grenville promised himself that he would shadow the Manx shearwater for a year, though he knew it would be a challenge to follow a pelagic bird (which spends most of its life on the ocean). He traces his efforts in this account, which offers a pleasant mixture of facts and an imagined narrative of the shearwater T72, a chick that he handles as she is weighed by researchers before her journey. T72 takes readers from the Scottish coast to Patagonia, then to Ireland and back to the Scottish Isle of Mull, which is where the author’s passion for the birds first took flight. The book has handy and often humorous footnotes, and readers will enjoy relaxing into the story, which, for all its imagined narrative, is grounded in realism. Endnotes include information on the conservation of shearwaters.