Vesper Flights: New and Collected Essays,

Nature girl CHARLES FOSTER Vesper Flights: New and Collected Essays By Helen Macdonald Jonathan Cape £16.99

Writing about the natural world is a dangerous, hubristic business.

Nature writers, to keep safe, have to adopt one of two strategies. Both have their parallels in the great religions.

The first is to appease by priestly acts, striving to present something clean, polished and perfect. Robert Macfarlane is the archetypal example. His prose is forbiddingly felicitous – the result of the most careful literary choreography. His books are immaculate liturgies, allowing him and his readers to go into the Holy of Holies of the woods without being blasted.

And the second is Helen Macdonald’s way – to wrestle with the angel of the wild until it gives a blessing, but risking a serious injury in the process. In Vesper Flights, a collection of essays about, she says, the ‘quality of wonder’, all her awesome gymnastic skill as a writer wrestler is on display. And so are some of the awkward falls that come with the wrestling profession.

The book is more interesting and accomplished than the rightly celebrated H is for Hawk. It should silence those unkind critics who suggested that Macdonald is a one-book wonder. Vesper Flights establishes her as a penetrating analyst of the relationship between humans and the non-human world.

That makes her sound austere. She’s not. She is splendid company, reflecting on nests and the meaning of home and place. She weeps when a meadow becomes a lawn, and observes that people live in skyscrapers for the same reasons they travel to wild places – to escape the city. She compares the freedom of migrating cranes to the plight of Syrian refugees, and watches a column of flying ants accompanied by a phalanx of herring gulls.

She fears that today’s children will learn to regard the constant disappearance of species as the ordinary way of the world. She observes that hides divide us from the natural world and encourage us to see animals and plants as spectacles.

Macdonald takes us to places I wouldn’t have the nerve to go to alone – to the comments appended

to internet dashcam footage of deer being hit by cars, for instance. ‘Am I the only one who thinks it’s funny when they bounce off the cars?’ wrote one commentator. Evidently not. ‘Oh man,’ wrote another. ‘I haven’t laughed this hard at a compilation in a long time…’ Macdonald sat very still when she’d read that.

Often she is infuriating, but always stimulatingly. She notes that, with the aid of an Australian bird book, she has identified a waratah, a hairpin banksia and a New Holland honeyeater. ‘Now I know these things,’ she says. ‘A few hours ago, I looked over a valley at sunset and knew nothing at all.’

‘No!’ I want to shout. ‘To name them is to have less knowledge about them than you had before. To name something – to create a smug, self-referential abstraction – is always to diminish.’ But she has started a worthwhile epistemological conversation.

Sometimes she falls. It’s an occupational hazard of the wrestler. Ideas and themes are shoehorned clumsily together in ways that obscure rather than mutually illuminate. But that’s because she’s so passionately engaged. Most of her connections fizz, showing relationship where we would never have expected it.

Macdonald’s main message is that we must be careful to ensure that our love of the natural world is not self-love.