Bird School: A Beginner in the Wood

An intimate exploration of the lives of birds and their interactions with man, by a preeminent naturalist. 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.Wanting to look and listen, to return to “bird school” and see what it might teach him, Nicolson built a small shed among the trees, a kind of man-sized birdhouse he calls an “absorbatory,” complete 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.Woven through with philosophy, literature, science, and a sense of wonder, always conscious 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. Read more