IT IS a good and loving parent, or teacher, who guides a child to notice the natural world around them, to learn how to look and enjoy, to be attentive and to listen. It has become increasingly difficult, since the Industrial Revolution, to remember, in our modern world, that we humans are part of nature, that we share DNA with the hedgerow and woodland, that we are related genetically to all other creatures that inhabit our small blue planet. Watch and Wonder is written with an aching awareness of this truth.

Richard Sutterfield is a priest in the Episcopal Church of the United States, having grown up in the rural pasturelands of Arkansas and Texas. He began birding as a young boy, unable to resist the call of the wild and the wonders of nature, its beauty, and its great ability to lead him (as through meditation on a religious icon) to an understanding of the divine. His deep fondness for birds quickly led him into the company of fellow enthusiasts and birding groups, gatherings akin to fellowships for worship.

There is a tendency, sometimes, to use the word “spiritual” to mean “not of this world”, detached, and above the hurly-burly of daily life. This is not the way in which the author uses it when he claims birding to be a spiritual practice. “Spiritual practices, at their best, are activities that help us become the kinds of people the world needs now.”

Becoming open to the transcendence within the beauty of the indigo bunting, or the elusive bittern, awakens an awareness of the unintended destructive ways of mankind. Our pet cats kill hundreds of millions of birds a year, equalled only by the numbers of deaths among migrating species as they fly into the unlit windows of office blocks at night. And who could have predicted that the purchase of woodland by tjhe Singer sewing-machine company would contribute to the extinction of the iconic ivory-billed woodpecker, a loss that the birding world still mourns?

In Watch and Wonder, we follow the author, with his binoculars and scope, his lists and identification books, through 12 months of rich birding, a year of focused attention and religious contemplation.

The Revd Adam Ford is a former Chaplain of St Paul’s School for Girls.

Watch and Wonder: Birding as a spiritual practice
Ragan Sutterfield
Broadleaf Books £12.99
(979-8-8898-3261-4)
Church Times Bookshop £11.69