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A Meditation on Birds, Landscape and Nature
by Mark Cocker
One night Mark Cocker followed the roiling, deafening flock of rooks and jackdaws which regularly passed over his Norfolk home on their way to roost in the Yare valley.
From the moment he watched the multitudes blossom as a mysterious dark flower above the night woods, these gloriously commonplace birds were unsheathed entirely from their ordinariness. They became for Cocker a fixation and a way of life. Cocker goes in search of them, journeying from the cavernous, deadened heartland of South England to the hills of Dumfriesshire, experiencing spectacular failures alongside magical successes and epiphanies. Step by step he uncovers the complexities of the birds' inner lives, the unforeseen richness hidden in the raucous crow song he calls 'our landscape made audible'. Crow Country is a prose poem in a long tradition of English pastoral writing. It is also a reminder that Crow Country is not 'ours': it is a landscape which we cohabit with thousands of other species, and these richly complex fellowships cannot be valued too highly.
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This information about Crow Country was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Mark Cocker is an author of creative non-fiction, an environmental campaigner, a passionate naturalist and tutor for Scotland's Creative Writing Centre Moniack Mhor, He writes and broadcasts on nature and wildlife in a variety of national media and in 2023 he releases a new book One Midsummer's Day: Swifts and the Story of Life on Earth (Cape). 2023 also marks his 35th year as a contributor to the Guardian country diary.
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