BIRTHDAY celebrations for Emily Bronte are really taking flight as the Parsonage Museum prepares for a second packed six months of activities.

The Haworth museum recently launched its Wings of Desire exhibition, which will run until July 23, and is free with admission to the museum.

And on the Bronte Society website it has released details of the next few events coming up before the end of the summer.

Keighley Central ward councillor Cllr Zafar Ali, the Lord Mayor of Bradford, was among guests during the launch of Wings of Desire this month.

Artist Kate Whiteford has produced new work inspired by the merlin hawk that Wuthering Heights author Emily nursed back to health in the mid-19th-century.

Kate, who specialises in land art, has combined film, poetry, music and paintings, and created a centrepiece film featuring footage of birds of prey in flight, the local landscape, and a birds-eye view of the flight to Top Withins.

The soundtrack includes Chloe Pirrie, who played Emily in 2016 Bronte biopic To Walk Invisible, reading from Emily’s poem The Caged Bird, and music from folk group The Unthanks.

The film can be seen in the Bronte Parsonage Museum, where there will also be Kate’s framed watercolour pictures inspired by Aerial Archaeology photographs of the Yorkshire Dales.

In the exhibition Whiteford meditates upon the iconography of the bird of prey, its metaphorical properties and associations with fight and flight, escape and predation.

Kate Whiteford is a renowned Scottish artist based in London. Her work crosses from art to archaeology, from fact to fiction, transforming sites worldwide from remote Hebridean island, to the hills above Nairobi, to inner city Coventry.

These monumental works have come to define a body of work that includes painting, drawings, tapestry and film. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Tate Gallery and she has represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale.

Birds that feature in the film will return to the Bronte Parsonage Museum on July 29, for another day of displays and handling by experts from SMJ Falconry.

Visitors can witness the beauty of hawks and other birds of prey in flight above the meadow behind the museum, from noon to 4pm.

The Bronte Parsonage Museum will continue its monthly talks on Tuesdays at 11am and 2pm, and the next one on July 3 will be entitled My Dungeon Bars.

A spokesman said: “Emily Bronte rarely left her native Yorkshire and when she did, it was with reluctance.

“This talk looks at the few experiences Emily had in the world at large and explores the idea that for her, home represented freedom, and her ‘dungeon bars’ were the constraint and alienation she felt when she was away.”

The talk is free with admission to the museum.

The Bronte Society is teaming up with Bradford Literature Festival to present a special event in Haworth on July 8 from 4pm to 5.30pm.

Renowned poet Jackie Kay will return to the village to celebrate the unveiling of her work commemorating Anne Bronte, specially commissioned by the festival, as part of the Bronte Stones project.

Jackie will read her work in Parson’s Field behind the Parsonage, where the Anne Stone is sited, then afterwards in the nearby Old School Room. She will team up with journalist and broadcaster Samira Ahmed to explore her inspiration, her work, and her affinity with Anne Bronte.

Jackie Kay MBE is the current Scottish poet laureate.

She has published five poetry collections for adults and several for children, as well as fiction books. Jackie was Writer in Residence at the Bronte Pasonage Museum in 2013. Among other prizes, she has won the Somerset Maugham Award, the Guardian Fiction Prize, and in 2016 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Journalist and broadcaster Samira Ahmed presents Front Row on Radio 4 and Newswatch on BBC1, and is a visiting professor of Journalism at Kingston University.

She made a special Front Row about the Brontes on location in Haworth, and while reading English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, her undergraduate thesis covered the portrayal of property and marriage in Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

Samira’s documentaries and articles often explore her fascination with the crossover of culture, politics and social change, particularly through women in the Victorian and Edwardian eras.

Her radio documentaries include The Fundamentalist Queen about the wife of Oliver Cromwell, John Ruskin’s Eurhythmic Girls, Laura Ingall’s America and HG Wells and the H Bomb.

She is currently working on a Radio 3 Sunday Feature about on the Victorian northern mill town heiresses who worked in archaeology and founded some of the great Egyptology museums.

Visit bradfordlitfest.co.uk or call 01274 238525 to book tickets.

Melanie Abrahams, this year’s guest curator at the Bronte Parsonage Museum, will lead a walk along Bronte pathways and moorlands on July 23.

She will be joined by guest speakers and artists John Agard, Sarala Estruch and Joe Williams, and local writer Tamar Yellin, as well as members of the public.

During a ‘walk of life’, inviting contemplation, reflection, and philosophical musings, they will be able to hear unfolding narratives, alternative stories and flights of fancy along both well-trodden paths, and lesser known routes.

Melanie is a curator, public speaker, calypso singer and producer who has channelled a love of words and books into projects and initiatives.

She is founder of organisations Renaissance One and Tilt who highlight the diverse canons of British and international literature.

Her contributions have been recognised through a ‘Women To Watch’ Award, and curatorships and speaker posts with the Bluecoat, the Royal Society of Literature, the British Council and Southbank Centre.

Until August 31, visitors to the museum can see one of the National Portrait Gallery’s most important pictures back in its original home.

The only known surviving portrait of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte together was painted by their brother Branwell in 1834 and is known as the ‘pillar portrait’ because of the central column Branwell added to obscure his own figure.

Visit bronte.org.uk for further information on all the activities to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Emily Bronte.