With its enchanting song, striking orange bill and endearing willingness to share our living space, the blackbird is one of our best-loved birds. But robins, swifts, goldfinches and blue tits can captivate us equally and, in The Blackbird Diaries, Karen Lloyd shares her deep-rooted affection for all our treasured garden wildlife. Over the four seasons, she intimately chronicles the drama and the joy, the perils and the pleasures of the natural world as it all unfolds in her garden and on her daily walks in the limestone hills and valleys of Cumbria's South Lakeland. What emerges is a celebration of landscapes that rarely feature in the existing canon of nature writing, and rare insights into the lives of the species that may be common but are remarkable creatures all.
Karen Lloyd is a writer of creative non-fiction and poetry and a wildlife conservationist specialising in ground-nesting birds. Based in Kendal, Cumbria, she is a contributor to the Guardian, BBC Countryfile magazine, Scottish Island Explorer, Scotland Outdoor and the Caught by the River blog. Karen is a member of Kendal's Brewery Poets and gained a distinction from the Creative Writing M.Litt programme at Stirling University. Her first book, The Gathering Tide, won a Lakeland Award and was selected in the Observer books of the year feature for 2016.
"A writer of rare talent, always with a sharp eye and an open heart, Lloyd quietly and unassumingly shares her observations of nature, drawing you into a world made rich with the company of birds."
– Miriam Darlington, BBC Wildlife