The Dun Cow Rib: A Very Natural Childhood

John Lister-Kaye has spent a lifetime exploring, protecting and celebrating the British landscape and its wildlife. His memoir The Dun Cow Rib is the story of a boy’s awakening to the wonders of the natural world. Lister-Kaye’s joyous childhood holidays – spent scrambling through hedges and ditches after birds and small beasts, keeping pigeons in the loft and tracking foxes around the edge of the garden – were the perfect apprenticeship for his two lifelong passions: exploring the wonders of nature, and writing about them. Threaded through his adventures – from moving to the Scottish Highlands to work with Gavin Maxwell, to founding the famous Aigas Field Centre – is an elegy to his remarkable mother, and a wise and affectionate celebration of Britain’s natural landscape.

Reviews of The Dun Cow Rib: A Very Natural Childhood

No one writes more movingly, or with such transporting poetic skill about encounters with wild creatures. — HELEN MACDONALD, author of H is for Hawk A great naturalist — CHRIS PACKHAM Generous, poetic and wise, John Lister-Kaye is a national treasure — PATRICK BARKHAM, author of Badgerlands A book of land-knowing by someone who has spent a gentle lifetime learning the languages of animals . . . with an untameable enthusiasm and generosity of spirit — JAY GRIFFITHS, author of Wild: An Elemental Journey John Lister-Kaye is one of the most joyful, inspirational naturalists I know — KATE HUMBLE Every word sounds with a long, close knowledge of place, with a profound appreciation and anticipation of each small change brought by the progression of a day or of a season. Beautifully observed and rich in description — ESTHER WOOLFSON, author of Corvus The renowned conservationist . . . who's learned to notice what others pass by without a second glance * * Mail on Sunday * * Lister-Kaye celebrates the turning of the seasons in prose that is as fine as poetry . . . the perfect observer of the to-ing and fro-ing of the wildlife that graces the landscape * * Sunday Express * * Lister-Kaye writes with infectious joy about the wildlife he knows and loves . . . his endless curiosity and constant fascination with the natural world around him reads more as love story than as tragedy — Caught By the River The spirit of nature holds many unknowns, mysteries and magic. John Lister-Kaye questions these unknowns with perfectly crafted words, delving so deep that you can almost feel nature's pulse — COLIN ELFORD, author of A Year in the Woods