Bird School: A Beginner in the Wood

By Adam Nicolson An intimate exploration of the lives of birds and their interactions with man, by a preeminent naturalist. 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. Wanting to look and listen, to return to “bird school” and see what it might teach him, Nicolson built a small shed among the trees, a kind of man-sized birdhouse he calls an “absorbatory,” complete 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. 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.

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