Book review: Bird School by Adam Nicolson

Jon Gower

In the spring of 1937 the young bird photographer Eric Hosking was trying to capture images of tawny owls in Doldowlod near Llanwrthwl in Powys.

To do so he had erected a twenty foot tall “pylon’ with a good view into a nest. Hosking spent a patient afternoon with his camera and flashlight waiting for a parent bird to return with no luck. He eventually called it a day, deciding to return the next and leaving his equipment in place.

But as he left he heard voices and decided to go back in case his stuff might be stolen. As he entered the hide he was hit in the face as a tawny owl’s claw slashed him, resulting in the loss of an eye.

He later took a photo of the bird that had attacked him and the attendant publicity led to his becoming one of the most famous professional photographers of his day, who would drive around Britain in a Rolls Royce to deliver lectures.

Bird house

This is just one of the many bird-related stories in Adam Nicolson’s Bird School, which sees the award-winning author teaching himself about the birds around his home, Perch Hill in Sussex. There he builds a bird house in the woods where he can watch their behaviour and learn about them. In this he’s a bit like Henry Thoreau, who lived in a cabin near Walden Pond in Massachusetts except this one’s has a wood-fired stove, a good camera to record the avian goings-on and is also equipped with Merlin, the wizard bit of software which helps you identify bird calls and songs.

Current science

It’s a deeply lovely book, right from the cover art by the Newport-born artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins and there are plenty of lessons to be learned throughout. The science is bang up to date so that we learn that current research suggests that birds can migrate courtesy of chemical changes in their eyes which allow them to “see” the magnetic fields of the earth as they perform their long and testing aerial journeys.

Fine nature writing abounds in its pages. Fledgling wrens emerge from the mossy cushion of their nest: ‘the little birds as round as bumble bees were dropping like drips from a tap.’ A blackbird ‘walks past with a bunch of black worms in its face as if it has just buried its bill in a plate of spaghetti al nero di seppia.’ Nicolson coins a bright neologism for the small birds such as the chaffinches, coal tits and marsh tits he sees around him: ‘These birds are quicks. Their governing term is “quick”. Quickness and smallness is what they are. They are living in a cloud of rapidity and self-absorption, unware of my presence.’

Gilbert White

And then there is the writing of others who have similarly been engaged with nature, from Wordsworth through John Clare to J.A.Baker. There’s one name that comes up almost by default in nature writing, namely Gilbert White, author of The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne but Nicolson doesn’t travel the usual road much travelled but judiciously selects entries from among the tens of thousands in White’s journals.

These are brisk 18th century news items about how ‘The Rook assembles on the nest-trees,’ ‘The Colemouse & the long-tailed titmouse chirp’ and ‘The missel-thrush sings.’ Nicolson points out ‘There is no gradation. Each phenomenon arrives unfiltered and uninflected on the page, not as science, not as a research programme destined for science but as a trace left by a listening and annoting mind.’

As Nicolson, a very attentive pupil, learns more about birds he occasionally consults experts and in this he is lucky that one of the world’s authorities on blue tits lives just down the road. Dr Martin Stemming, from Sussex University loves they way the small birds are dressed in ‘most of the colours of the planet, the colours the astronauts saw from space.

He explains ‘with some relish the blue tit’s scientific name, Cyanistus caerulus obscurus’ is ‘Linnean Latin for “the heavenly hidden blue one”, as if each was some version of a minor Chinese god.’

There’s plenty more to learn from the book’s bright lesson plan, such as the analysis by twentieth century naturalist George Bolam of pellets underneath a raven roost near Llanuwchllyn in Eryri, or what Nicolson suggests constitutes ‘the hungriest of shopping lists:’

‘Two had managed to swallow a hedgehog each. One had eaten an enormous fish, another an entire grouse. The birds had been down to the sea and crunched their way through crabs, sea-urchins and winkles. Most of the pellets contained oats, wheat grains, beech mast and acorns. One bird had tried a cherry and another a hazelnut.’ The list of food items goes on, including anything from weasels to lumps of white quartz, eaten by these huge crows which are clearly ravenous, if your pardon the pun.

Sublime music

With a beautiful male blackbird on the cover it stands to reason there’s a chapter about these uplifting songsters in the book and it’s superb, as Nicolson connects the thrush’s phrasing and patterning of notes with the human sublime of Beethoven’s music. He travels to Bonn to see if he can hear the blackbirds singing the phrases the composer used in his creative life.

Some Scottish birds have been hear to sing the opening two bars of the Violin Concerto in D while phrases from Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge have sounded out in the Hampshire garden of pianist Sylvia Bowden. In Nicolson’s urbane company we discover that a solo blackbird performer adds decorations to its song as it repeats it during the nesting season, composing it so that it is ‘considered, selected, buffed, burnished and chosen’ as the one that particular bird felt it needed during a spring season of daily recitals.

Hopes and longings

At one point Nicolson pauses in his bird studies to ponder how ‘Birds are vessels for our hopes and longings. We want to see beauty and possibility in them, to identify with their quickness, their brightness, their liberty.’

By taking the reader to Bird School this award-winning and always arrestingly good writer assesses many such avian qualities, even as he underlines the challenges they face, from the failures of UK Government agricultural policies through large-scale trapping of migrant birds as the pass through Europe to the less obvious dangers of our love of birds and habit of feeding them, which can spread disease or allow some species to thrive at the expense of others.

It’s a wise book, peppered with philosophical asides, all calibrated carefully between celebration and concern for birds. Anyone who attends this engaging school-between-two-covers will finish its pages feeling like a very knowledgeable graduate because the best pupil often makes the best teacher.

Bird School: A Beginner in the Wood by Adam Nicolson is published by William Collins and is available from all good bookshops.