Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru
Owl House, The
Owl House, The
Couldn't load pickup availability
Disgrifiad Cymraeg / Welsh Description
Hanes perthynas Daniel Butler gyda dwy dylluan wen a fu'n nythu yn ei ffermdy hynafol yng nghanolbarth Cymru. Wrth iddo sylwi'n fanwl arnynt, arweiniwyd Butler i ystyried amgylchiadau ac amodau byw y dylluan wen - un o adar mwyaf poblogaidd y Deyrnas Unedig. Mewn darn o lenyddiaeth swynol, mae Butler yn dadlau bod yr adar yn arwyddo newid yng nghefn gwlad Prydain.
Disgrifiad Saesneg / English Description
The story of Daniel Butler's relationship with two barn owls which, unusually, nested at his ancient farmhouse in rural mid Wales. His close observation of the birds lead Butler to consider the condition of barn owls – one the the UK's most popular birds. He argues they are a cypher for changes in rural Britain, in a fine piece of pastoral writing.
Manylion y cynnyrch / Product details
- ISBN 13
- 9781781725061
- Gwales Code
- gwales.com.9781781725061
- Gwerthwr / Vendor
- Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru
- Long Title
- Owl House, The
- Awdur / Author
- Butler, Daniel
- Current Price ex VAT
- £12.99
- Current Price inc VAT
- £12.99
- Availability Status (EN)
- Available
- Availability Status (CY)
- Ar gael
- Dyddiad cyhoeddi / Publication Date
- 2020-11-27
- Cyhoeddwr / Publisher
- Seren
- Media Type (EN)
- Hardback
- Media Type (CY)
- Clawr caled
- Pages
- 240 pages
- Size
- 135 × 208 mm
- Language Code
- English
- Categori / Category
- CY: Natur, Daearyddiaeth, Daeareg (yn Saesneg) | EN: Nature Studies, Geography, Geology (in English)
- Is-gategori / Subcategory
- CY: Anifeiliaid, Adar a Physgod (yn Saesneg) | EN: Animals, Birds and Fish (in English)
Bywgraffiad yr Awdur / Author Biography
Daniel Butler has been a freelance writer and journalist since 1991. He has published 6 books about nature and the countryside, including The Red Tail, Sharing the Seasons with a Hawk (Cape, 1994). Butler was the ghost writer of Jimmy Doherty’s A Farmer’s Life for Me for HarperCollins. His journalism has been published in the Telegraph, Country Living, Countryside, The Independent, Daily Express, Country and Border Life, the Central Office for Information, the Brecon Beacons National Park. He was the editor of Tree News in 2008. Daniel is also a fungi expert, a mycology tutor in the Department of Lifelong Learning at Aberystwyth, and runs foraging courses in season – www.fungiforays.co.uk. He has also researched and presented food and rural programmes for Channel Four and Radio 4.
Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review
Twenty-five years ago, Oxfordshire-based journalist and falconer Daniel Butler and his pregnant partner Bel decided to move to Wales. Bel was London born and bred, but Butler had some ‘humble, very vague, Welsh roots’ through his maternal grandfather, so in a sense he was ‘homing’, as well as following his dream of having a smallholding and living closer to nature. They started looking in Monmouthshire, but their search gradually took them further west and north until they found ‘the house of our dreams’: Tan y Cefn, a stone-built farmhouse with outbuildings and ‘about eleven acres of rough grazing, a small conifer plantation and a duck pond’, standing at 1,100 feet above sea level, not far from Rhayader. The Owl House is a very readable account of life at Tan y Cefn, with its various joys and challenges, and of the abundant wildlife there. There are badgers and foxes and, to Butler’s delight, barn owls, which he encourages to nest in one of the barns, with mixed success. As a falconer, Butler has an ‘obsessive interest in birds of prey’, and the book is rich in information and detail about Wales’s raptors, from owls to buzzards, kites, merlins, peregrines and sparrowhawks. Birds of all kinds abound and, having lived in mid-Wales for most of my life, I was surprised to realise that some of the birds I simply take for granted in my milltir sgwâr are quite rare in other places. ‘No sooner than I arrived in Wales,’ writes Butler, ‘I was amazed by the sight of birds I’d never spotted before’: nuthatches, jays, great spotted woodpeckers, pied flycatchers, redstarts – all residents and migrants who share space with us, but which keen birders apparently come especially to mid-Wales to see. It has made me realise how lucky we are! The title is perhaps a little misleading, as the book is beautifully broad-ranging and embraces nature in all its glory, from birds to bats, and polecats to porcini. Butler evokes the great joy of being quietly out in nature, simply being present and watching, so you see things you might otherwise have missed: young goshawks on their maiden flight over a lake, lampreys mating in the fast-flowing water of a river, ‘a cascade of four fox cubs’ playing at the entrance to an earth. And he cites some of the extraordinary – and rather enchanting – traditional beliefs that have only quite recently been debunked by science, such as the belief that swallows hibernated in the mud at the bottom of ponds, and the fact that ‘until comparatively recently it was commonly believed that at the end of the breeding season, [cuckoos] mutated to spend the bulk of the year as sparrowhawks.’ With The Owl House , Butler makes his own quiet contribution to the library of contemporary nature-writing rooted in a specific place. He gives readers a sense not just of the joys and challenges of sharing space with wildlife (bats in the bedroom, owls in the barn, mice in the airing cupboard perhaps …) but also of the mixed blessings of living remotely, where the cold, mud, snow and endless days of rain are offset by open spaces, big dark skies and a lack of noise and air pollution. He has followed a dream that many share. And it has worked.
Share
