DARA McANULTY
(LITTLE TOLLER BOOKS, 224 PP, £16)
Tablet bookshop price £14.60 • Tel 020 7799 4064
“This is what I want to be,” says Dara McAnulty in this inspiring account of his relationship with the natural world: “surrounded by kindred spirits, doing useful things with care, knowledge and clarity … Surely this would mean I’d be happy.”
McAnulty, a 16-year-old campaigner and naturalist from Northern Ireland, who recently became the youngest ever recipient of the RSPB Medal for services to conservation, makes this remark in the course of a diary entry documenting an expedition to Scotland to tag goshawks. The observation provides one of many examples of this “inward-looking, reticent” young man, diagnosed with autism and Asperger’s at the age of six, finding in his devotion to nature not just a means of escaping the anguish of a particular moment, but of envisioning the lineaments of a future in which he might be free from bullying and anxiety, no longer “scarred by the hurt of others”.
