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Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald review – towards the sixth extinction

<span>Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer</span>
Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer

In H Is for Hawk, her 2014 memoir of a year spent taming a raptor as she tried to get a grip on her reckless grief at the loss of her beloved father, Helen Macdonald felt for a voice that was as fearless and precise as its subject. In desperation to step outside herself and her sorrow, she wanted a language that captured the otherness of a goshawk, red in tooth and claw, even as she established a certain truculent kinship with it. At times, as a result, that book put you in mind of Gerard Manley Hopkins at his most transported, the writer seeing with the eye of the thing she describes. In this collection of essays, written over the past decade, Macdonald extends that vision far and wide.

The essays are connected, as she suggests, in the way that the objects in an 18th-century cabinet of curiosities were connected, by accident and strangeness and wonder in the eye of the beholder. Meditations about “death and sex and mushrooms” sit alongside memories of buck hares fighting in the spring; encounters with wild boar muscle up against the extraordinary aerial spectacle of millions of migratory birds witnessed above the Empire State Building, or the strange tale of Britain’s spy chief who tried to tame a cuckoo, or the eccentricities of ornithologists when they flock together. Macdonald’s writing about the world beyond her senses comes with a little three-point manifesto: “To understand that your way of looking at the world is not the only one. To think what it might mean to love those that are not like you. To rejoice in the complexity of things.” But there is, in each of these essays, also a clear sense of the sensibility that is doing the looking: patient, alert, learned and excitable.

Related: Helen Macdonald: 'It is hard to write about the natural world without writing about grief'

Before she was a writer, Macdonald, now 50, was a historian of science, and before that she was a girl who lived in a small cottage on a walled estate on the edge of the South Downs, where she would disappear into the woods, summer and winter. Everyone around the estate, Tekels Park near Camberley, knew her and her family, and “they’d have quiet words with my parents after they’d yet again spotted me knee-deep in the middle of the pond looking for newts, or walking past the guesthouse with a big grass snake, two feet of supple khaki and gold twined about my arms”.

All such childhood elysiums presage a fall, and Macdonald’s life has coincided with what she insists on calling the “sixth extinction”, the devastating manmade cull, particularly of insect species. If this destruction is to be reversed, Macdonald argues, the first reawakening needs to be that sense of awe at exactly what is being lost: “I think of the wood warbler,” she writes, to give one example, “a small, citrus-coloured bird fast disappearing from British forests. It is one thing to show the statistical facts about this species’ decline. It is another thing to communicate to people what wood warblers are, and what that loss means, when your experience of a wood that is made of light and leaves and song becomes something less complex, less magical, just less, once the warblers have gone.”

She has the ability not only to itemise the world around her, but to celebrate its essential and profound connectedness

Macdonald is making it her mission to communicate as exactly as possible what wood warblers and a host of other species are, in the hope that her words are not obituaries. Her description of “flying ant day”, that summer afternoon in Britain when patios become swarming airfields, is a memorable example of her ability not only to itemise the world around her, but to celebrate its essential and profound connectedness. Her focus typically shifts from the extraordinary drama of ant queens taking flight, trailing pheromones, enticing the worker drones chasing them aloft to mate in a fatal last act, to the gulls and swifts and a single red kite drawn to their rising column. The “warm airspace” above a country church spire becomes “tense with predatory intent and the tiny hopes of each rising ant”.

This book is thrillingly full of such moments; it is, too, a powerful – and entertaining – corrective to the idea that the only hopes that matter on this planet are those of our own species.

Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald is published by Jonathan Cape (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15