Call of the Kingfisher : Bright sights and birdsong in a year by the river

A stunning debut combining lyrical nature writing with exclusive audio recordings of the English countryside.

This enchanting love letter to a short stretch of Northamptonshire's River Nene celebrates all the wild things that live there, especially the kingfishers. For four decades, composer and wildlife recordist Nick Penny has walked beside the river at Oundle—but for one extraordinary year, he gave the waterway all the time it asked for. The more attention he gave it, the more he saw the kingfishers and heard their high whistling calls.

Woven through the narrative are explorations of local history and landscape—from Roman and Bronze Age sites to watermills and centuries-old stone churches—alongside homages to naturalists who lived nearby and encounters with forest dawns and dusks listening to nightingales. The backdrop throughout is the sights and sounds, greens and browns of the riverbank, shot through with the blue and orange threads of a kingfisher's glowing feathers. The book includes access to high-quality birdsong recordings made alongside the River Nene: audio soundbites of nature's riches, from kingfishers and nightingales to owls and cuckoos, accessed via QR codes.

This is a book about the things that can be seen and heard when we approach nature with patience and curiosity. It celebrates people who have used that focus to help preserve wildlife and pass on their knowledge to future generations. Above all, it serves as a call to appreciate what we've got, wherever we are, and to use our ears as much as our eyes when we experience the natural world.