Owl Sense

A BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week

Longlisted for the Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize 2018

A Guardian Book of the Year 2018



The owl has captivated the human imagination for millennia; as a predator, messenger, emblem of wisdom or portent of doom. Owl Sense tells a new story.



On 'owl walks' with her teenage son, Benji, Miriam Darlington begins a quest to identify every European species of this elusive bird. From Britain she travels to Spain, France, Serbia and Finland, and to the frosted borders of the Arctic. Along the way, however, Benji succumbs to a mysterious and disabling illness, and Miriam's endeavour soon becomes entangled with the search for his cure. Bringing the strangeness and magnificence of owls to life, Owl Sense is a book about wildness in nature but also in the unpredictable course of our human lives.



Miriam Darlington is a poet and author of Otter Country. Reviewers hailed her as a successor to Gavin Maxwell and Henry Williamson, and as a central part of the new nature writing movement. She has a PhD in English from the University of Exeter and a particular interest in the tensions, overlaps and relationships between science, poetry, nature writing and the changing ecology of human-animal relations.