Tim Dee

One December, in midsummer South Africa, Tim Dee was watching swallows.

They were at home there, but the same birds would soon begin journeying north to Europe, where their arrival marks the beginning of spring. Greenery recounts how Tim Dee tries to follow the season and its migratory birds, making remarkable journeys in the Sahara, the Straits of Gibraltar, Sicily, Britain, and finally by the shores of the Arctic Ocean in northern Scandinavia.

On each adventure, he is in step with the very best days of the year - the time of song and nests and eggs, of buds and blossoms and leafing.

Beginning in summer with breeding seabirds in Shetland and ending with nightjars in the heart of England, Tim Dee maps his encounters with birds over four decades of tracking them around the world. He tells of familiar but near-global birds like sparrows, starlings and ravens, and exotic species, like hummingbirds in California and bee-eaters in Africa. Dee restores us to the primacy of looking, and takes us outside, to marvel at what is flying above us.