
Field Notes From a Hidden City is set against the background of the austere, grey & beautiful northeast Scottish city of Aberdeen. In it, Esther Woolfson examines the elements
- geographic, atmospheric & environmental
- which bring diverse life forms to live in close proximity in cities. Using the circumstances of her own life, house, garden & city, she writes of the animals who live among us: the birds
- gulls, starlings, pigeons, sparrows & others; the rats & squirrels; the spiders & the insects. In beautiful, absorbing prose, Woolfson describes the seasons, the streets & the quiet places of her city over the course of a year, which begins with the exceptional cold & snow of 2010. Influenced by her own long experience of corvids, she considers prevailing attitudes towards the natural world, urban & non-urban wildlife, the values we place on the lives of individual species & the ways in which man & creature live together in cities.