Review by Peter Reason
‘The first time I met a bird close-up, it was dead. A raven.’
From this grab-your-attention first line and the evocative description of this encounter, I am hooked. The following chapters draw me in deeper. Throughout, the writing is gorgeous – elegant yet unfussy, richly descriptive without over-doing it, well-grounded in observation and research. This is latest in a series of wonderful books by Adam Nicolson focussing on different aspects of the more-than-human world. Horatio Clare in The Spectator gives us a line I wish I had written: ‘This is some of the best English prose of our time’.
Nicolson says he knew nothing of birds. He claims he has ‘walked thousands of miles across a diminished Britain without ever truly recognising what was or wasn’t there’. He tells us how his friend, lifelong birder Tim Dee, challenged his ignorance, complaining that Nicolson sees the landscape but not the inhabitants. And he quotes Mark Cocker’s assertion in Our Place that the English have fetishized ‘a landscape beauty almost devoid of biodiversity’. Responding to these challenges, he sets out to teach himself about birds. He chooses a field on his farm that is no longer fit for agriculture and builds a shed from which he can observe the birds in the Sussex Weald. When I first read ‘shed’ I imagined something cheap and cheerful from B&Q. But Nicolson’s shed is purpose built, oak-framed, raised on stilts, with wood burner inside and nest boxes incorporated in the walls. It’s a proper job, a fitting place for Nicolson’s regular observation and disciplined research.
The fruits of his observation and research are presented in the nine chapters that form the heart of the book. Each has two headings: the class or name of bird, and a quality of birdlife. Wrens/Surviving teaches us about the ‘spectacular life-drive of the wren’. Robins/Occupying how ‘song extends the bird body… and in that sense sense song, territory and bird are one’. Owl/Hunting tells us that Tawney Owls can’t see very well and so navigate their woody territory largely by memory. Buzzards/Flying reflects on the contrast between the ‘quick’ tits, finches, thrushes and others that live around his hut and the slower soaring birds of prey above; this leads him into the natural history of flight, from dinosaurs onwards. Blackbirds/Singing takes us from the experience of birdsong to Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, Ravel, and on to contemporary research exploring the nature of birdsong and its relation to human music.
This inspired chapter structure allows Nicolson not only to describe his encounters with the birds featured in each chapter but to research and write more generally about the quality it exemplifies. These chapters seamlessly present research far beyond the observation of the birds with direct and fascinating observation.
Nicolson writes of his experience of watching:
It is strange how much happiness it brings. I can hardly turn myself away. I’m learning nothing. I’m seeing life in action and it has all the pleasures of listening again and again to the same song, the confirming familiarity of those repetitions. I do not need to dominate the birds or think of them as mine but day after day their close co-presence brings a heartfelt, life opening sense of well-being.
And to the extent any piece of writing can draw the reader close to the original experience, this writing does just that.
Toward the end of the book, Nicolson, sadly but inevitably, turns to Man/Reckoning, a chapter that reflects first on the history of those who have studied and loved birds from St Francis through Julian Huxley to Gilbert White. However, in present time, ‘the large and overarching story of English birds in the last century is mournful’. We have lost vast numbers of birds, up to eighty or ninety percent in the worst cases. This has happened through ‘general carelessness and ignorance, made knowable, ironically, only through the years of close attention and record keeping by those who knew something was wrong’. Some of this loss is actually caused by our caring: as we put out bird feeders, on the one hand we spread disease, and on the other boost the population of the most aggressive birds (yes, sweet little blue tits!) at the expense of other.
His final chapter, Perch Hill/Reculturing turns to the question of ‘how to make the environment right for the birds’. What can Nicolson do on his own farm? He wonders about ‘passive rewilding’ – stopping all farming to ‘let the form of the historic landscape sink slowly under the impenetrable tangle of thorn and bracken that would erupt there…’ which would allow the birds to return. This has happened at Strawberry Hill Farm in Bedfordshire. What was a modern farm with huge fields for mechanical harvesting was left to its own devices in the late 1980s and has become ‘something astonishing… a shrubland ballooning into open grassy rides’ with a very significant and varied bird population. Is this, or equally Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell’s Knepp, a model for Perch Hill?
Nicolson decides that passive re-wilding is not the way he want to go. He doesn’t want to live in impenetrably thorny scrub for twenty years, and anyway that scrub needs some kind of management if it is not in time to become woodland, more enclosed and a less suitable for birds. He wants to ‘restore’ the land ‘to what seems like the most valuable thing about the place, its late mediaeval landscape, the interlacing of natural and cultural the centuries-long pattern of pasture, wood, meadow, garden, house and rough grounds’. His duty to the place is to re-invigorate it – and what a wonderful and rare thing to read, not of the profit that can be made from the place, but of duty toward it.
Throughout his account, Nicolson acknowledges the contribution made to this project by his wife, gardener, cook, and writer Sarah Raven. The final chapter, Birds in the Garden/An aviary without a cage, is written by Raven, recounting the ‘ever-evolving calendar of birds feasting plants through the year’. She reports her Eureka moment, ‘look after our garden birds and they’ll help keep our pests in balance and under control.’ She recommends a judicious use of bird feeders scrupulously cleaned but mainly suggests garden sources of food through the year.
As I complete this review I am interrupted by a call with a good friend, to whom I sing the book’s praises. He interrupts me, saying, ‘that’s not like you, you are usually more critical’. He is right. But the more I dip again into Bird School to pick out suitable quotes for my review, the more I find myself drawn back into the book – for what I learn about birds and for the pleasure of reading Nicolson’s exemplary prose.
1 Horatio Clare. The complexities of the dawn chorus. The Spectator, May 3, 2025
2 Strawberry Hill Farm was acquired by the Wildlife Trust after a public appeal for funds. See Patrick Barkham in the Guardian. Incidentally, I visited one evening this spring for folk singer Sam Lee’s Singing with Nightingales. It is a beautiful place, filled that sunny evening with wonderful and varied birdsong; later we sat in the dark and listened to at least four nightingales.
3 Isabella Tree. (2018). Wilding: The return to nature of a British farm. Picador.
Peter Reason is currently engaged in a series of experiential co-operative inquiries exploring living cosmos panpsychism: He has been regularly sitting with the River Avon and with invocation and ceremony addressing River as a community of sentient beings: “If I call to the world as sentient being, what response may I receive?” He is writing about this inquiry in at Learning How Land Speaks. He has just launched Objects&Lives, short writing and imagery reflecting on household and personal objects that hold value through the memories they hold and their associations with family and cultural history. His online presence is at peterreason.net.
Adam Nicolson, Bird School (William Collins, 2025). 978-0008490836, 448pp., hardback.
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