In Search of One Last Song: Britain’s disappearing birds and the people trying to save them

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A treasury of a book … filled with beautiful moments, amazing and sometimes rather surprising characters, and, if we could only learn from them, reasons for hope.” - John Burnside, New Statesman There are reed cutters and coppicers whose ancient crafts have long sustained vital habitats for some of our rarest birds but whose voices often go unheard. One of the great oral histories of British nature and the British countryside … Sad and honest and important and often very funny” - Richard Smyth, Review 31 The writing is strong, the book an impressive debut, establishing Galbraith as a quality writer.” - Tim Dee, Caught by the River

I struggled somewhat with 'In Search of One Last Song'. The author's heart is clearly in the right place, and he clearly has a lot of passion as well as writing talent - but the execution of the book left much to be desired, in my view. The ‘massive link’, for example, that Highlands gamekeeper Ewan Archer sees between the decline of the capercaillie and the resurgence of the pine marten is something he is powerless to act against. It seems the Scottish government won’t authorise any kind of population control despite seeing ‘plenty of pictures of pine martens coming out of capper nests with eggs in their mouths’. In terms of both scope and execution, this book is a hugely impressive achievement, and it will be fascinating to see where Galbraith goes from here.” - The Scotsman

Through talking to musicians, writers and poets, whose work is inspired by the birds he manages to see, such as the nightingale and the capercaillie, Galbraith creates a picture of the immense cultural void that would be left behind if these birds were gone. Among those he meets, there are feelings of great frustration. He explained to me that Galloway has changed so much, the loss of cattle, the loss of small farms and the families that worked them, and the planting of non-native trees. In terms of both scope and execution, this book is a hugely impressive achievement, and it will be fascinating to see where Galbraith goes from here.' The Scotsman A treasury of a book ... filled with beautiful moments, amazing and sometimes rather surprising characters, and, if we could only learn from them, reasons for hope.' John Burnside, New Statesman

Our wild places and wildlife are disappearing at a terrifying rate. This is a story about going in search of the people who are trying to save our birds, as well as confronting the enormity of what losing them would really mean. Whether it’s the spire of St Lawrence’s, Lechlade, leading him in the general direction of a partridge, the touching inscriptions on the graves of a country churchyard which reverberate with the call of a turtle dove, or the glorious time when, in search of a kittiwake, we are treated to a man in Twatt, Orkney, who is midway through a steak slice, describing the Church of Scotland’s Great Disruption as a fit of “religious mania”. Galbraith is constantly encountering religion while on his own pilgrimage, and writes of it with care and affection. For others, birds represent a broader heritage. On the south coast, Sam Lee is not just an advocate for nightingales but a musician who works with their material. ‘They taught us so much of our culture,’ he says, ‘and they gave us the rhythms of our lives. They held our stories, they held our narratives, and they held our mythologies.’ It's a delight to jump into this slightly strange parallel world. Galbraith is such an able communicator of its weirdness, that it is a pleasure to go along for the ride" Galbraith’s writing is beautiful … In Search of One Last Song feels like an important step in the right direction” - Stephen Rutt, British Birds

Other stories

A modern pastoral written with intelligence, wit and lyricism.' CAL FLYN: author of the best-selling Islands of Abandonment Sometimes these birds figure as direct links to precious personal histories. ‘Heard it purring in the hedge,’ remembers Graham Denny in Suffolk, thirteen days after his father died, ‘and I just howled and howled. Turtle doves is something I shared with my dad my whole life.’ The trouble, though, is that farming a small herd of slow-growing native cattle such as Highlands is so marginal that lots of crofters are being forced to sell up to wealthy holiday makers, who are ­detached from the rhythms of the land. Wonderful and enriching’ Adam Nicolson ‘The best book on conservation and the countryside I have read in years’ John Lewis-Stempel ‘A modern pastoral written with intelligence, wit and lyricism’ Cal Flyn So, casting aside any preconceptions I have spent much of the last two days reading this excellent book. It will, for sure, be one of my books of the year for 2022.

Full Book Name: In Search of One Last Song: Britain’s disappearing birds and the people trying to save them I heard my first corncrake calling among the primroses, while lying in a sleeping bag, beneath an old stone dyke on a small tidal island off North Uist. It called twice and all night, I shivered and listened, but by the time the sun rose over the Minch, it hadn’t called again. There’s a ­suddenness and a spontaneity with birds. An encounter might ­suggest a line or a phrase or an image which ­allows me to compose. It’s immense joy and I think birds allow you to meditate on the impossible.”Unfortunately, though, these important debates are being spoiled by a vocal minority of trolls who aren’t really interested in the issues, try to derail the conversations, register under fake names, and post vile abuse. This is no fluffy synodical motion about brother and sister bird, however; Galbraith is a proper countryman, and refreshingly honest about the fact that conservation often involves culling. Creation is not some story-book abstract here, but a lived reality: the people and places as known and loved as the birds and their song. The book is a triumph and well worth a meditative read, a love song to Britain’s birds and to those who love them. May they continue to “praise him and magnify him for ever”. The book is the record of the author’s quest – through Scotland, England and (briefly) Wales – to interview the remarkable individuals fighting for the survival of ten of Britain’s rarest bird species. In the end the large farm next door bought the fields – everything will be done harder and faster, wet corners drained, and the land improved. The main problem was the amount of extraneous detail. You could chop maybe a fifth or sixth of the text away without any loss - all the scenes that didn't involve birds, and were simply observations of random people that Galbraith saw on his wanderings. And yes, in certain contexts and in certain books, such content is appropriate and fitting - but they didn't belong in a book that is presented as being about birds heading towards extinction, and the people who love them.

For a while we walked in silence and then I asked her why the ­fishermen thought the corncrakes had gone. “Just greed,” she replied, “they’d have said it was greed.” It’s a journey to the margins – often geographically, always culturally. Chris Dodson, a thatcher in the East Anglian fens, explains that with the demise of managed reed beds the bittern is losing its ancestral home. Old Billy Jolly in Kirkwall remembers when industrial fishing first stripped the local waters of sand eels, staple diet of the kittiwake (whose numbers in Orkney have now fallen by 90%). Graham Denny on his 200-acre Suffolk farm puts hedges over profit for the sake of the area’s few returning turtle doves. Along the way, from Orkney to West Wales, from the wildest places to post-industrial towns, he meets a fascinatingly eclectic group of people who in very different ways are on the front line of conservation, tirelessly doing everything they can to save ten species teetering dangerously close to extinction. In Search of One Last Song mixes conservation, folklore, history, and art. An important and timely book that explores the human context of an ecological emergency. Galbraith is a thoughtful, assured and elegant writer who brings a mature intelligence and open-minded insight to his subject."As we wandered on, along the beach, Katrina told me she’s always thought, as a poet, that birds are both “the ­animating spirits of place”, and “deeply ­embedded metaphors about our longing, our ­human longing to escape, and our gravity and physicality”. Galbraith's writing is beautiful ... In Search of One Last Song feels like an important step in the right direction' Stephen Rutt, British Birds I’ve been looking forward to reading this book – but with some trepidation. I know the author just a little, he bought me lunch once, and I chose my words carefully and somewhat guardedly with him. Why? Because he is the editor of the Shooting Times.