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

Later, when I encountered bird people who had spent their years of apprenticeship learning and attending to the birds, I slid past them. I remember in Turkey, making a radio programme on Homer with my friend and lifelong birder Tim Dee. As we stood together on the Trojan plain, perched on the slopes of a Bronze Age tumulus known as the Tomb of Achilles, he said he could hear a woodlark singing above us. I began to talk into his woolly microphone about the beauties of that place, its oak woods, its leaning, creaky olive groves, the lionskin of late summer grasses, the endless, homeless north wind blowing across from the steppes, and said something about 'the song of a lark high above us'. Tim stopped me: 'Not a lark, a woodlark.' He can never watch a film without agonising over the presence of the wrong birds at the wrong time of year on the soundtrack.

We started again and I said 'lark' again and I remember his frustrated, raised eyebrows and the pursed lips of the radio producer who remains silent, his eyes on the horizon, as his contributors mouth idiocies.

It is a reproachful memory, symptomatic of a certain frame of mind. And so a couple of years ago I decided to embark on an attempt to encounter birds, to engage with a whole and marvellous layer of life that I had lived with in a kind of blindness and deafness for decades.

I wanted to look and listen, to return to Bird School and see what it might teach me. I knew it would be long, slow and bitty. Birds don't easily offer themselves up and in that way differ from our modern experiences in which the wanted or desired is almost constantly available. Birds move too fast or are too far away. We summon their alarm. Their concealment is occasionally interrupted only by a flickering, transient, uncertain presence. 'Nature likes to be hid,' Heraclitus wrote in Ephesus 2,600 years ago and as such birds are the opposite of a landscape view that lays itself out in a kind of horizontal, placid seductiveness. Birds refuse that subjugation. They are often on the run, intent on a life in which the human observer is merely a threat or annoyance. They know how to fly away, neatly like owls or buzzards, with a kind of disdainful calm, or like pigeons with a grand fluster of feathers and noise, or blackbirds with a car-alarm-disturbed-terror-shriek; or to hide and creep, to stay still and silent, like the snipe or woodcock in the most anxious stillnesses in nature, to warn each other of some alien mammal in the neighbourhood and to observe us far more than we ever observe them.

Experiments have shown how much they dislike the threat that a human eye represents. They don't like being looked at, and birds, if you look at them too hard, will fly away. The eye-spots on butterfly wings are designed to alarm bird predators and the reaction of most birds, especially in the young, is to take flight. The response is more powerful when it is a watching face; a pair of eyes is more frightening to them than a single eye-shaped form and one can experiment with this: watch with your hand over one eye and the birds might be untroubled. Remove it and they will flee. Deep in their adaptive minds is the knowledge that predators have their eyes in the front of their heads, giving them the necessary, wide, binocular gaze, and it is that double, watching, hungry vision that birds fear and avoid.

We bring terror in our wake. Charles Foster, the English writer on the wildness of animals, has said that whenever he wanders into the section of a bookshop called 'Birdwatching', he looks for those books that might describe or try to describe the experience of birds watching us.

What do they make of us? What is that large mammal that likes to stop on its walk through the wood and somehow transform its little eyes into a pair of bug-eyed predatory lenses with which it tracks us as we pass? Could we ever trust it? What is its world, its intention? What does it want?

I have come to think that the inaccessibility of birds is the heart of their marvellousness. Both concealment and their capacity for distance and height is their form of pride. We do not own them. They possess themselves, even as their indifference makes us long for them. 'You don't hear birds, you hear worlds,' Olivier Messiaen, the great French composer, once wrote. That unknowable otherness, the way in which they represent the complex, involved presence of entire life systems that are not-us but are somehow interleaved with our own, is the source of the birds' beauty. They are unknowability itself alive in front of us, coloured, feathered, voluble, quick, inaccessible, with something fractal about them, so that the more you look, the less you know. Or perhaps the more you look, the more you know how little you know. You can only be led towards them, as if into a mystery.

2. Birdhouse: ABSORBING

I slowly developed a double thought: not only to learn something of birds but to make a place, despite the general crisis, that might be accommodating and receptive to them. I live in the Sussex Weald, damp and tree-thick country. We first came here thirty years ago, on the run from London and looking for a refuge, somewhere my wife Sarah and I felt we could be happy. We found a small, slightly abused dairy farm in the rough country on the borders of two ancient parishes, Brightling and Burwash. It was called Perch Hill, meaning stick hill, because the high clay soils of the fields were good for growing little else. Over the previous decades, as the economics of modern dairying pinched on small farms, it had been driven increasingly hard, its trees felled, hedges and even small woods taken out and pastures re-sown with dominant modern rye-grasses. By the early 1990s, when we arrived, the farmer had finally given up, having sold the cattle and let out the whole place as grazing for sheep.

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.