BIRD SCHOOL

A poetic study of birds and their place in the Anthropocene.

Nicolson grew up ignoring birds. For the British naturalist and author, they used to be “a blank, a flicker of nothing much, like motes in sunlight.” To fill this gap in his knowledge, Nicolson decided to attend his own “Bird School”—a personal commitment to learning about birds, their behaviors, and their relationship to human beings. To do so, he constructs an “absorbatory,” an observatory in his Sussex Weald farmland where he sought to “dissolve…the boundary between self and world.” Most chapters use a common species to explore a wider topic: robins and how they mark their territory, tits and breeding, ravens and how they think and communicate. While birds are a hyperlocal interest, much of the knowledge he shares is broad enough that readers will learn about bird behavior in general. In a chapter on songbirds, for example, readers learn that birds alter their singing schedule to work around an airport’s loudest hours. In addition to a wealth of facts about bird behavior, Nicolson has access to an endless fount of lyrical descriptions to make birds come alive on the page: A blackbird sings as “if a cherry could sing…rounded and full and fleshy, that dark sugar-juice”; holding a dead raven is like “exploring a derelict house.” The final two chapters address the elephant in the absorbatory: As mankind has flourished, most bird populations have dwindled. Nicolson’s solutions may be more applicable to those who own large swaths of land or work in environmental policy, but the book’s wider point can inspire any of its readers: If we learn to pay attention to the world around us, we’ll become a part of it again.

An evocative ode to English birds that invites readers to look more closely at the world around them.