Bird School A Beginner in the Wood

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.

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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.