Excerpt from Bird School by Adam Nicolson, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

1. Bird School: LEARNING

The first time I met a bird close-up, it was dead. A raven. Even seeing it on the side of the mountain road in Crete was a shock: a large, dark splayed body the size of a small dog. I stopped the car and got out, not quite certain if I would find a wounded animal, enraged at its fate and frenzied in pain. But it was properly dead. Whatever it had once been had left. Holding its rigid form – all looseness and flexibility gone; it was as stiff as a dried cod – feeling my way around it, rustling open its wing feathers, pushing through the soft plumage on its nape and back, was like exploring a derelict house. Rafters, furnishings, upholstery, timbers, abandonment. It had been shot and its bill was bloodied in gouts towards the point, yet the midnight blue of its back and wing shimmered in my hands, each sheathing layer overlapping the next in soft-edged scales.

The bird felt like a miracle of construction: the splitting-axe of its bill, more palaeo than any piece of bird-body I had ever seen, capable of crushing the skull of a rabbit in one slow, final closure; the nape that it ruffles and raises in both anger and desire; the spread of the primary feathers in the wing, no matter wasted, each rib as structural as a medieval vault, as fine as necessary, graded in width and strength from outer to inner and from tip to root.

And then the claw, dirty from life, knobbled like a Malacca cane, the darkness giving way, as an undertaker's shoe might when muddied beside the grave, to a leathered practicality, armoured against the world and padded against rock.

The dead bird was not the bird. The body seemed only to have been the means by which the bird could have become itself. But that moment of closeness to such an animal was the beginning of something for me.

I had never paid much attention to birds. For whatever reason – perhaps because everyday birds were too small, too evasive, too difficult to know, requiring too much patience and too much submission to their ticky little habits – I had not cared about them. Or not bothered to care.

My family had never been troubled by them. My father – no naturalist – was always more interested in looking across a bit of country than in what it might be made of. The view was the thing, not the plants or animals in it. As a boy I never chose to understand the birds or tried to learn the songs or calls. I did love seabirds – big, obvious, loud, heraldic, unmistakable – and came to know them on our annual holidays in Scotland, but the birds in the wood or the garden at home remained a blank, a flicker of nothing much, like motes in sunlight.

Why this indifference? Perhaps because attending to the birds seemed marginal to the bigger stories. Perhaps because my father looked down on anything like that. He built himself a gazebo – an eighteenth-century joke: 'I will gaze', as a fusion of Latin and English – on the corner of the garden from which he could survey a stretch of country 'unchanged since Jane Austen saw it', as he would often say. A view, or a landscape as it was always more grandly described, precludes a love of anything else and as the naturalist Mark Cocker described in Our Place, his excoriating 2018 account of the failure of modern nature organisations to attend to the well-being of nature, this view-addiction has presided over a destruction of everything else. Perhaps because of an inherited taste for parkland, carpet has seemed better than vitality, smoothness than mess. The Britain Cocker portrayed has fetishised a 'landscape beauty almost devoid of biodiversity … Nature is slipping away from these islands … Not since the last ice age has Britain been so stripped bare of its natural inhabitants.' In common with that presiding culture, I had walked thousands of miles across a diminished Britain without ever truly recognising what was or wasn't there.

Excerpted from Bird School by Adam Nicolson. Copyright © 2025 by Adam Nicolson. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.