Like spending the day at the tide's edge, the writing ebbs and flows and washes over you this work is calming, knowing, and wise. Essentially a collection of ten essays that Ackerman wrote during her three year stay on the Delaware Bay, each contain precise observations of the astounding abundance of nature (birds and beyond), intertextual connections (scientific and literary), abstractions to humanity at large, and brief forays into Ackerman's personal life. I didn't realise that my brand new ARC of Birds by the Shore (to be released May of 2019) is actually a slightly revised and renamed re-release of Jennifer Ackerman's 1996 book Notes from the Shore and that's not a problem, as I haven't read the original, but having now finished I have to wonder, “Why the new title?” The original suits the material so much better this is about so much more than shorebirds. Both were engrossing, filled with the richness of particularities and yet mysteriously universal.

I discovered in nature the same appeal I found in books. With a quiet passion and friendly, generous intelligence, it explores the way that landscape shapes our thoughts and perceptions and shows that home ground is often where we feel the deepest response to the planet. This portrait of life at the ocean's edge will be relished by anyone who has walked a beach at sunset, or watched a hawk hover over a winter marsh, and felt part of the natural world. Against this landscape's rhythms, Ackerman revisits her own history-her mother's death, her father's illness and her hopes to have children of her own. Birds by the Shore is a book about discovering the natural life at the ocean's the habits of shorebirds and seabirds, the movement of sand and water, the wealth of creatures that survive amid storm and surf. From the bestselling author of The Genius of Birds, the revised and reissued edition of her beloved book of essays describing her forays along the Delaware shoreįor three years, Jennifer Ackerman lived in the small coastal town of Lewes, Delaware, in the sort of blue-water, white-sand landscape that draws summer crowds up and down the eastern seaboard.

Birds by the shore jennifer ackerman