Bird School

'This is some of the best English prose of our time' Spectator

‘A feast for mind and soul' Isabella Tree

'A marvellous and revelatory guide to our native bird-life' Daily Mail

Step into the hide for a glorious new encounter with the British wild

Close to Adam Nicolson’s 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 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.

'Golden threads of literary, philosophical and scientific insight run through Nicolson’s book, along with a sense that we are embarking on an adventure with him into a realm that we cannot hope to fully understand' The Times

'A worthy addition to a literary lineage that stretches back to the 18th-century writer and naturalist Gilbert White… Bird School, then, is a fitting title: we should learn to rekindle our enduring love affair with birds, before they vanish from our sight' Daily Telegraph