Bird School

‘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

‘I have learnt so much. Every page is a thrill. Bird School has opened my eyes’

Isabella Tree, author of Wilding

Adam Nicolson is the author of many books on history, travel and the environment. He is winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and the British Topography Prize and lives at Sissinghust Castle in Kent. His most recent book for HarperCollins is Sissinghurst, a wonderful and personal biography of a place – the story of a heritage, of a vision of connecting once more buildings and garden, fields and farms and of how that dream was realised.