A big birding year

Looking for birds gave one man a form of salvation. That's the story of "Lost Among the Birds: Accidentally Finding Myself in One Very Big Year," by Neil Hayward (Bloomsbury, 386 pages, $28).

Hayward was having a midlife crisis. So what did he do? He went birding. Over the course of one year he got so into doing it that he ended up setting what birders refer to as the Big Year record. He spotted and identified an extraordinary 749 species of birds in one year. He details his quest in this memoir.

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