Bird School: A Beginner in the Wood

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Step into the hide with the bestselling and award-winning nature writer Adam Nicolson for a glorious new encounter with the British wild.

Close to Adam Nicolsons home in Sussex, there is a forgotten field overrun by bracken and thicketed by brambles. It is the haunt of deer and many birds nightingales, the occasional cuckoo, ravens, robins, owls and in summer the sweet-singing warblers that come north from Africa to breed in English woods.

This gorgeous book charts his attempt to encounter birds, to engage with a marvellous layer of life he had previously almost ignored. He wanted to look and listen, to return to bird school and see what it might teach him.

He built a small shed amongst the trees with nesting boxes and bird feeders. Cocooned inside, season after season, he got to know the birds: where they nest, how they sing, how they mate and fight, what preys on them, what they are like as living things.

Beautifully written and woven through with philosophy, literature, science and a sense of wonder, always conscious that that this is an age in which the natural world is under siege, Bird School pulls back the curtain on seemingly ordinary birds, taking a long, careful and concerned look at our relationship with the wild.

Reviews

PRAISE FOR ADAM NICOLSONS LIFE BETWEEN THE TIDES

Miraculous Effortlessly, in deft, sure and delightful prose, he segues through species, science and art to present tidal nature as a microcosm. The result is an utterly fascinating glimpse of a watery world we only thought we knew
Philip Hoare

A beautiful, powerful story of how we understand the unfolding change of the shore.
This is a remarkable and powerful book, the rarest of things, both a call-to-arms and a call-to-pause and truly look. Nicolson is unique as a writer, happy soaked to the skin on the shoreline and happy unweaving skeins of philosophy. I loved it
Edmund de Waal

Pure joy. From the ecology of a sandhopper to the cosmic pull of the tides Adam Nicolson takes us paddling into the pools of our own nature a dazzling, kaleidoscopic exploration into the meaning of life itself
Isabella Tree

A fascinating guide to all things littoral: a natural history of the rockpool that teems with life Endlessly interesting, its wonders unfurl, fractal-like, the more closely you examine it
Cal Flyn

The man who finds wonder in a winkle Remarkable In Nicolsons hands the intertidal zone is shown to be rich and revelatory It is as lyrical, learned and rambunctiously eccentric as his previous work For a book so focused on non-human life, it is luminously humane
The Times

Exquisite A bravura act of writing This uniquely and terribly moving book is great literature indeed reaches beyond itself to speak to us of the most profound and essential things
Alex Preston, Observer

One of our finest writers of non-fiction Nicolsons overarching theme in this book goes to the very heart of what ecology is the great pleasure of this book is that he does not allow the specifics of his enquiries to keep him from probing the big questions
Philip Marsden, Spectator

Author Bio

Adam Nicolson is the author of many books on history, travel and the environment. He is winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and the British Topography Prize and lives on at Sissinghust Castle in Kent. His most recent book for HarperCollins is Sissinghurst, a wonderful and personal biography of a place the story of a heritage, of a vision of connecting once more buildings and garden, fields and farms and of how that dream was realised.