When was the last time you looked at a shorebird? Really looked? Even veteran birds, myself included, are guilty of overlooking those little brown and grey smudges on the water’s edge. Too far away, too flighty, too hard to identify. “They are the birds ‘out there’, on the edge of the tideline, not really very noticeable creatures, and yet they have such extraordinary lives,” writes Tasmanian journalist Andrew Darby. 

His book, Flight Lines, follows the extraordinary journey of migratory shorebirds, as they travel from Australia to Alaska and back again. Our entry into this world is through two grey plovers, captured with projectile cannon nets on the shores of South Australia. Darby follows their journey via satellite tags, as well as pilgrimages to the bird’s stopover sites on their migration route. 

But this is so much more than just a story about plovers, or even birds. Darby received a lung cancer diagnosis as he was writing, and his account of the perils of migration is interwoven with his own struggle to understand and endure his illness. “The capacity of these birds to persist is what I found astonishing, and to someone who lives a precarious life with cancer, like me, it’s a lesson,” he writes. “You know, I will come and go – these birds will roll on.” (JEH)