Helen Macdonald's first book, H is for Hawk, announced a voice of remarkable clarity and originality — a writer who could hold grief and natural history in the same sentence without sentimentality. Vesper Flights is the essay collection that followed, and it confirms that the voice is not a product of extraordinary circumstances but a consistent way of being in the world.
Essays as a Form of Attention
The book gathers essays written over several years, some previously published in the New York Times and elsewhere. They range from extended meditations — on swifts, on the falconer’s art, on a visit to a Hungarian bird-ringing station — to shorter, more lyrical pieces that feel like field notes from an unusually philosophical naturalist.
What unifies them is an insistence on attending: to the precise, specific, individual creature in front of you, not to “nature” in the abstract. Macdonald is interested in what you actually see when you are looking at a swift in flight, not what you are supposed to feel about it. This makes her writing unusually honest and, paradoxically, unusually moving.
The Title Essay
The collection’s finest piece is the title essay, which describes swifts at dusk performing a behaviour known as “vesper flights” — climbing to extraordinary altitudes, sometimes several kilometres high, before swooping back down. Why they do this is not fully understood; one hypothesis is that they are navigating by the stars, orienting themselves in space. Macdonald uses this behaviour as a lens for thinking about the human need to rise above the everyday and see where we are — geographically, historically, ecologically.
The essay is a model of how nature writing can carry philosophical weight without becoming abstract. The swift never becomes a symbol; it remains a swift, doing something real and observable, while also opening onto questions that far exceed ornithology.
We are all of us engaged in the business of finding out where we are. The swifts rise to do it. We might try something similar.
— Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights
6 Key Ideas From This Book
Across the essays, Macdonald argues implicitly that the capacity to attend carefully to non-human life is not merely an aesthetic pleasure but an ethical practice — a way of acknowledging the reality and value of other lives, which is a prerequisite for caring about them.
Several essays push back against the human tendency to use nature as a mirror for our own emotions — to project grief, joy, or longing onto animals and landscapes. Macdonald argues for a harder, more honest form of attention that resists this projection, even when projection is comforting.
An essay on glow-worms in England — now vanishingly rare due to light pollution and habitat loss — makes the argument that the disappearance of a species is not just a biodiversity statistic but the erasure of something from the shared experience of a culture: a language of reference, a childhood wonder, a form of beauty that will never be available again.
Macdonald resists the idea of wilderness as a place separate from human activity. Wildness, she argues, is a quality of encounter — it exists in the space between a person and an animal or landscape when something unexpected and uncontrolled happens. It can occur in a city park as well as in a national reserve.
Several essays draw on Macdonald's deep knowledge of falconry to explore how the practice of training and flying birds of prey teaches a form of attention to animal behaviour — and animal difference — that is qualitatively different from passive birdwatching.
The book includes direct engagement with Brexit, nationalism, and the politics of belonging — arguing that the impulse to fence off "natural" landscapes as belonging to particular national identities is both ecologically incoherent and politically dangerous. Nature does not respect the boundaries that human politics imposes on it.
Any Weaknesses?
As is common with essay collections, the book is uneven. The strongest pieces — the title essay, the glow-worms piece, an extraordinary meditation on mushrooms — are among the best nature essays written in English this century. Some shorter pieces feel more occasional, more closely tied to specific commissions.
The book is also more personal and political than the pure natural history reader might want. Macdonald makes no apology for bringing her views on Brexit and nationalism into a nature book. Some readers will find this enriching; others will find it distracting.
Readers who loved H is for Hawk and want more of the same voice, and for anyone who believes that nature writing should grapple with politics rather than offering escape from it.
H is for Hawk by Macdonald herself — the predecessor that established this voice — and The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd for another model of attending to landscape in the same spirit of rigorous openness.
Journalists and essayists from outside the nature-writing tradition. Macdonald's essays are masterclasses in structure and tonal control — models for how to move between the personal, the scientific, and the political without losing the reader.
This is not a comforting book about the beauty of nature. It is a book about the difficulty and importance of seeing clearly in a time when the natural world is disappearing. Read it with your attention on, not as relaxation.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Vesper Flights worth reading?
Vesper Flights confirms Macdonald as the finest nature essayist writing in English right now. Uneven as collections always are, but the best essays here — the title piece especially — are the kind of writing you carry in your head for years afterward.
Who should read Vesper Flights?
Readers who loved H is for Hawk and want more of the same voice, and for anyone who believes that nature writing should grapple with politics rather than offering escape from it.
What is Vesper Flights about in one sentence?
Helen Macdonald's first book, H is for Hawk, announced a voice of remarkable clarity and originality — a writer who could hold grief and natural history in the same sentence without sentimentality.
The Verdict
Vesper Flights confirms Macdonald as the finest nature essayist writing in English right now. Uneven as collections always are, but the best essays here — the title piece especially — are the kind of writing you carry in your head for years afterward.
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