Ireland through the eyes of a brilliant teenage naturalist

Dara McAnulty is a teenage naturalist from Northern Ireland. He has autism; so do his brother, sister and mother — his father, a conservation scientist, is the odd one out. This book records a year in the life of a gifted boy in an unusual family. Minutely detailed observations of birds, insects, trees and weather are woven into an ecstatic description of the unrolling of the seasons. It is also an impassioned and original plea for protection for ‘our delicate and changing biosphere’.

The diary is valuable in several ways. The writing of it is necessary to Dara himself, his means of processing his experiences. When he’s outside, absorbed in nature, he’s mentally storing his observations. Only later, through writing, can he make full sense of what he has seen, heard, touched, smelled, tasted. ‘What started as scribbles and scratches on the page has grown into an essential shape in my days.’

He helps the neurotypical reader to understand what it feels like to be autistic. Dara and his siblings are ‘high-functioning’ — verbal, academically able. It’s easy to make the mistake of thinking that this is ‘mild’ autism, not a big problem. Dara puts us right:

I often imagine a canopy of leaves above my head, protecting me from the world. More often than not, though, it doesn’t work. The humiliation builds into despair. I get completely exhausted by the amount of energy spent taking deep breaths, ignoring remarks, weathering punches. By solstice in June I’m like Scarecrow on the way to Oz, his straw insides hollowed out.

Bullying and incomprehension are not his only difficulties. Autistic intensity is overwhelming; listening to a corncrake ‘crexing’, thinking about the destruction of its habitat, Dara is suffused with ‘loneliness and despair’.