Clippings:

Karen Altenberg reviews Adam Nicolson's The Seabird's Cry.

"The early 20th-century biologist Jakob von Uexküll, the 'Prospero and hidden mage of all modern seabird studies,' as Mr. Nicolson puts it, introduced the concept of Umwelt, German for 'surrounding world,' to describe how each species exists within a 'self-centered world' in which the biological foundations for a cognitive being are fostered. According to Uexküll, animal behavior can only be described in relation to the environment that a particular species perceives. The Umwelt of the seabird is oceanic: a realm that the human mind can never fully understand. 'That,' Mr. Nicolson writes, 'instinctively and subliminally, is what these birds mean to us, voices from the interior of self and ocean, bringing to consciousness those unseen worlds, making apparent what would otherwise be hidden.'"