In British Columbia’s remote and exotic Cariboo Plateau, “Everything is slow. Everything is happening at the same speed, which is no speed at all.” Harold Rhenisch has spent eleven years watching birds every day from his house on the shore of 108 Lake—at this speed, but you wouldn’t know it from reading Winging Home. Known as “one of Canada’s master prose stylists,” Rhenisch dissects avian behaviour with the ear of a poet and the mouth of a stand-up comedian. His blackbirds are a jug band in full flight, his robins drunken bachelors on a jag, and his eagles decrepit, stumblebum scavengers.

With lively illustrations by noted bird artist Tom Godin, Winging Home: A Palette of Birds is more than just writing about the natural world. It is a lyrical, evocative memoir of life in the Cariboo that crackles with humorous, often startling observations of birds and men set amidst the wild beauty of British Columbia.