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.