My next book – Windhover

I have been watching kestrels for decades. My local paper once carried a story with the headline Schoolboy has Theory about Kestrels. It was not a theory at all – I had simply written to correct a factual error in an earlier article. The kestrel was not, as the report stated, very rare outside Scotland, but was Britain’s commonest raptor and a daily sight on the farmland and remnant heath fifteen minutes’ walk from my front door.

But the paper was only interested in the novel idea of a thirteen-year-old budding ornithologist with a theory. I failed to persuade the reporter that the most important thing was the bird itself – one that inspired curiosity, excitement and awe and that lived right there, near my home town of Swanley in Kent.

Watching kestrels ignited a lifelong passion for the extraordinary nature of ordinary nature. Over the next fifty years, moving around the country and ending up here in West Yorkshire, I was to learn something about ordinary nature: it must never be taken for granted – even the kestrel is now a declining species, along with dozens of others whose presence alongside us I once would have assumed could never be in doubt.

A year among kestrels

When I retired I decided to devote a year of my birdwatching time to one species – something ordinary, somewhere ordinary. I could think of no better place than the farmland and woods that surround the small Yorkshire hamlet where we have now lived for 27 years, and no better subject than the kestrel.

For a year I acted as scribe as the landscape told its own story, with kestrels usually somewhere in the foreground, but with a supporting cast of fascinating, and mostly fairly common, other wildlife. At some point, it became a book – when I realised that I needed to write it all up in order to place myself properly within that landscape. Not utterly insignificant, but no more extraordinary than all the other ordinary things. Windhover will be published in 2026 by Eye Books, date to be announced.