Nature Writing
Coming Soon
By: Adam Nicolson(Author)
456 pages, 16 plates with colour photos; b/w photos, b/w illustrations, b/w maps
![Bird School]( "Bird School")
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About this book
From the bestselling and award-winning nature writer Adam Nicolson, a glorious new adventure into the British wilderness.
By Adam Nicolson's home, there is a forgotten field overrun by bracken and thicketed by brambles. It is passed through by deer, wild boar and many birds – nightingales who sing in the evening, a cuckoo, turtle doves, pheasants, robins, owls. A couple of years ago, he decided to embark on an attempt to redress his ignorance, to encounter birds, to engage with this marvellous layer of life he had so far looked past. He wanted to look and listen, to return to 'bird school' and see what it might teach him.
This gorgeous book is the result, tracing Adam's adventure setting up a small shed on the edge of the field and getting 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. It is beautifully written and woven through with philosophy, literature, science and emotion. Bird School pulls back the curtain on seemingly ordinary birds, and exposes our relationship as people with the wild.
Customer Reviews
Biography
Adam Nicolson is a prize-winning writer of many books on history, nature and the countryside including The Sea is Not Made of Water, The Making of Poetry, Sea Room, God's Secretaries, The Gentry and the acclaimed The Mighty Dead. His 2017 book, Seabird's Cry was picked as Waterstones Book of the Month in Scotland and won the prestigious Wainwright Prize for nature writing and the Jeffries Prize. He is the winner of the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the W.H. Heinemann Award and the British Topography Prize. He has written and presented many television series and lives on a farm in Sussex.
Nature Writing
Coming Soon
By: Adam Nicolson(Author)
456 pages, 16 plates with colour photos; b/w photos, b/w illustrations, b/w maps
"This is some of the best English prose of our time [...] Nicolson's work is engrossing and uplifting because his extraordinary descriptive powers are matched by his attention and insight [...] Bird School demands that we expand our bordered selves and our limited knowledge, that we inhabit wider realities made of other lives [...] It is vital to our senses of hope and meaning that we attend to what is present in the world and what composes this present, Nicolson argues [...] The genius of this book is to marry the study of both, in art and joyful craft"
– Spectator
"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
"Bird School is elegant and involving. Like one of the nests Nicolson finds on his property, it's been deftly assembled"
– Observer
"A marvellous and revelatory guide to our native bird-life [...] There are chapters on songbirds and on migrants, all jam-packed with fascinating insights, as well as entire chapters on some of our most charismatic species, such as tawny owls and ravens [...] Bird School is a magical reminder of the rich, inexhaustible pleasures of watching wildlife and bird-life, not as an obsessive twitcher trying to tick off rare species, but simply being in nature [...] Bird School is an intoxicating and joyous invitation to us all, to step out into nature and take it all in. Relax. Breathe. And listen to the birds"
– Daily Mail
"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
