Osprey

By John Lister-Kaye

In Osprey, the latest book in Little Toller’s acclaimed monograph series, the writer and naturalist John Lister-Kaye tells a story of practical conservation with a keen eye and a poet’s ear, with an important bird at its heart – the osprey.

For thousands of years the osprey nested widely across Britain, returning each spring from West Africa to breed. But in the nineteenth century they were driven to extinction by egg collecting and the systematic persecution of birds of prey on shooting estates. But since the 1950s ospreys have slowly returned.

In 2019 John Lister-Kaye and a team of young naturalist-rangers at the Aigas Field Centre west of Inverness set up a single old telegraph pole and wove a nest of sticks at its top, and waited.

In Osprey, Lister Kaye records the nature around the loch as he waits for the ospreys in quiet and always rapt anticipation, sometimes with frustration, but always with hope, as finally the birds come to nest. In his eightieth year Lister-Kaye brings a lifetime of nature and stories to Osprey, a captivating, entertaining account of the slow healing of landscapes and a life lived in the hope that the wild will return.