Bird School

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What to expect

‘A feast for mind and soul, a treasure trove of insights into the enigmatic and enchanting world of the birds we share our lives with but barely notice. I have learnt so much. Every page is a thrill. Bird School has opened my eyes' Isabella Tree, author of Wilding

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 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.

Critics Review

‘Deeply satisfying… 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

‘Bird School is a woodland-bird counterpart to his prizewinning The Seabird’s Cry, about the ten oceanic species that breed on the Hebridean Shiant Isles. This book is broader in scope, to match its subject and audience, and similarly combines vivid eyewitness accounts with facts and figures… full of manifold erudition and, like his previous bird book, avian vulnerability, which increases globally and relentlessly’


The Oldie

‘Bird School is a feast for mind and soul, a treasure trove of insights into the enigmatic and enchanting world of the birds we share our lives with but barely notice. I have learnt so much. Every page is a thrill. Bird School has opened my eyes’

Isabella Tree, author of Wilding

‘A joyous journey of discovery! Bird School is a natural history tour de force and an impressive blend of the personal, scientific and cultural’

Tristan Gooley, The Natural Navigator and bestselling author of How to Read a Tree

‘A wonderful synthesis of patient fieldwork, science and spirit of inquiry. Bird School is a book which is tuned to the beauty, fragility and wonder of birds. As moving as it is fascinating, it is also a deeply inspiring work which made me see and appreciate the birds anew’

James Macdonald Lockhart, author of Wild Air

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