Tropic Days

A night-jar chick lies among dead leaves so perfectly still that feather and foliage seem one—and its parent vanishes like a scrap of bark in the breeze.

In Tropic Days, E. J. Banfield keeps company with an island off tropical Queensland, where three inhabitants share smooth beaches, silent bush, and days measured less by clocks than by sun, rain, and the stirrings of the season. What might look like idleness becomes a close watch on a world alive with hidden motion: blossoms break out, insects rise after rain, birds announce themselves—or disappear before the eye can follow. Banfield turns from the claims of “sordid industry” to the freedoms and duties of island life, alert to every delicate sign that nature is keeping its own counsel. How much can a quiet day disclose to the one who learns to look?

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