Chicken, Spike the magpie, and, most recently, Ziki the Crow have formed sibling relationships with Woolfson’s daughters and with each other: cached food in her kitchen wall and laid eggs in her living room called to her at dawn, and perched companionably on her knee of an evening and taught her more than she ever expected about birds and about human beings. Amazed by their intelligence and personalities, Woolfson became fascinated by corvids. Influenced by her own long experience of corvids, she considers prevailing attitudes towards the natural world, urban and non-urban wildlife, the values we place on the lives of individual species and the ways in which man and creature live together in cities.Įsther Woolfson’s daughter rescued Chicken, a fledgling rook sixteen years ago.

In beautiful, absorbing prose, Woolfson describes the seasons, the streets and the quiet places of her city over the course of a year, which begins with the exceptional cold and snow of 2010. Using the circumstances of her own life, house, garden and city, she writes of the animals who live among us: the birds – gulls, starlings, pigeons, sparrows and others – the rats and squirrels, the cetaceans, the spiders and the insects. In it, Esther Woolfson examines the elements- geographic, atmospheric and environmental- which bring diverse life forms to live in close proximity in cities.

–Isabella Tree, author of Wildingįield Notes From a Hidden City is set against the background of the austere, grey and beautiful northeast Scottish city of Aberdeen. –Frans de WaalĮlegiac, haunting and piercingly intelligent…A profoundly moving and important book.

Timely and wide-ranging, Esther Woolfson’s book offers sensitive reflections on how we relate to the animals around us as well as the animal within. She explores our representation of animals in art, our consumption of them for food, our experiments on them for science, and our willingness to slaughter them for sport and fashion, as well as examining concepts of love and ownership.ĭrawing on philosophy and theology, art and history, as well as her own experience of living with animals and coming to know, love and respect them as individuals, Woolfson examines some of the most complex ethical issues surrounding our treatment of animals and argues passionately and persuasively for a more humble, more humane, relationship with the creatures who share our world. Beginning with the very origins of life on Earth, Woolfson considers pre-historic human-animal interaction and traces the millennia-long evolution of conceptions of the soul and conscience in relation to the animal kingdom, and the consequences of our belief in human superiority. Between Light and Storm: How We Live with Other SpeciesĪ landmark new book about the fraught relationship between humans and animals that takes us from Genesis to climate change.

Corvus by Esther Woolfson